Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

by Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy, and anatomizes the “anti-philosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Addressing the crucial moment where Wittgenstein argues that much has to be passed over in silence—showing what cannot be said, after accepting the limits of language and meaning—Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms. in the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project—and that a continuing dialogue with the exemplar of anti-philosophy is crucial for contemporary philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Contemporary

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find myself really enjoying Badiou's anti-philosophy directed works (I have read his takes on Lacan and Wittgenstein now). I honestly didn't have much knowledge of Wittgenstein's work, and after reading this, it seems that what I thought I knew was mostly misguided. So I'm not the best person to judge whether Badiou's take on Wittgenstein is strong or accurate. But one thing I can say is that it is interesting. Badiou's elaboration of what he thinks anti-philosophy is, what its major goals and tactics are, is similar in this work to what he described in the longer Lacan work based on his seminar.

[Begin slightly muddled explanation...]

According to Badiou, anti-philosophers (such as Pascal, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan) all attempt to disassemble and devalue mainstream philosophy through several tactics. Many times this has to do with asserting the impossibility of knowing any Truth, or at the very least, the impossibility of being able to say or articulate this Truth in a larger logical system of thought. Instead, they want to replace the empty theorizing of philosophy with the Act (a very individual and seemingly indescribable experience that occurs and forever changes the person who experiences it). For Wittgenstein this Act was apparently the wordless experience of Grace or God, and an aesthetic/ethical experience (or as Badiou claims, archi-aesthetic). For Lacan it was the analytical Act that occurs during psychoanalysis and according to Badiou is an archi-scientific happening. Also, once this Act has occurred, it is up to the Act's Subject to "carry the weight" of that experience (Wittgenstein) or to "not give way on one's desire" (Lacan) in order to carry the value of that experienced Act forward in time. Apparently, this is all different from the Sophists (ancient or modern) who argue that any truth theorized by philosophy is always already caught up and contained by its own language and hidden purposes, but which do not posit the need for an Act or Event as a human experience.

[End slightly muddled explanation...]

One thing I've decided pretty strongly, after reading these two works along with Badiou's book on Ethics, is that Badiou takes these anti-philosophers very seriously. He explicitly writes more than once that for any true philosophy to have any standing or value it must consider and seriously confront and accept the challenges presented by the anti-philosophical stream of thought. You can see that Badiou has attempted to answer and incorporate these challenges in his own theories, including his concepts of Event (a re-named Act), Subject, Being, and Truth. In some sense it seems that Badiou tore anti-philosophy down to its basic core elements, and then reused them as building blocks to create his own system and theory. There will still be disagreements about the core trio of concepts: Truth / Meaning / Knowledge. But my guess is that if you read Being and Event after reading his works on the anti-philosophers, you would have a fairly good idea of why his theory ended up the way it did.

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be not only an interesting work on Wittgenstein, but one of the most enjoyable pieces by Alain Badiou that I've had the opportunity to read. What impressed me most was the philosophical precision with which Badiou interrogated Wittgenstein's "Tractatus."
As Bruono Bosteel's introduction explains, Badiou has recently attempted to define two traditions that he feels serve a foundations for philosophy precisely by attacking the philosophical tradition: sophistry and anti-philosophy. Those who Badiou labels modern sophists, such as Derrida, replace the philosophical distinction between truth and error with the distinction between speech and silence. For sophists, the problem of though is not to uncover truth, but simply to persuade the other that what is being said is believable, that what is being said can be said in a meaningful fashion. Language functions for the sophists the same way the Church (God) did for medieval thinkers and the subject did for the philosophers of the Enlightenment- it is that which cannot be transcended and which therefore provides the philosopher (sophist-in-disguise) who sides with it an absolute foundation for their thought. Sophistry attacks philosophy's sense of purpose, but it actually serves as a necessary compliment to philosophy. For, without the sophistic challenge to truth which philosophy must overcome, philosophy could delude itself into imagining itself the producer of truth, imagine that it makes a thought true just by thinking it. For Badiou, philosophy can only discover and enunciate new truths that emerge from political, scientific and artistic revolutions- which he calls Radical Events. Ironically, without the sophistic challenge philosophy runs the risk of devolving into sophistry.
Anti-philosophy, on the other hand, appeals to notions of the unsayable- to truths that are so intense and transcendent that they cannot be conveyed- they can only be felt, lived. Anti-philosophy thus resists both philosophy, which Badiou defines precisely as the articulation of newly unleashed truths, and sophistry, which insists that nothing exists outside of the the articulateable. Anti-philosophy also provides philosophy with necessary support, exactly because the great anti-philosophers succeed in suggesting the inexpressible. The anti-philosopher feeds off of the uncertainly created by Radical Events. At times, the work of an anti-philosopher can itself be a radical event. And it is during such events that philosophy again becomes necessary. Badiou offers Nietzsche as the paradigmatic example of an anti-philosopher. He also considers the Wittgenstein of the "Tractatus" to be an anti-philosopher, but the later Wittgenstein to be a mere sophist. This is because the "Tractatus" clings to a notion of the "mystical"- a state of being that can be felt, but not known.
Badiou begins his interrogation of the "Tractatus" by noting the profoundly religious ambitions of its author. For Wittgenstein, happiness can be achieved only by living according to sense. That is to say, one must strive for certainty in expression. Wittgenstein's demands on thought are so stringent that they feel more like those of a master architect than a philosopher. For this reason, Badiou characterized the "Tractatus" as an "archiaesthetic" work. It seeks to show even what cannot be shown b showing what can be shown so comprehensively and, at once, precisely. That which is revealed through its inexpressibility in the archiaesthetic work is, for Wittgenstein, the Mystical, God. What is at stake in the archiaesthetic act, the quest for clarity, is a life lived according to sense- which is to say happiness, or non-sense, which is to say negation of the divine, a life not worth living.
Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is the most depraved form of non-sense. It seeks to pass itself off as sense! The metaphysical tradition, at least sense Plato, has sought to convey the ungraspable through expression- i.e. idealism. The call and response of skepticism and metaphysics dare to ask "how is it that something is known?" and then attempt to answer the question. Both are unacceptable for Wittgenstein because the initial question is non-sensicle. The question is, for Wittgenstein, an assault on the Divine. In contrast to this tradition, Wittgentsein seeks to create a work where language sows its own limit, answering all answerable questions, and therefor points us to the unknowable, the Divine, so that we may live ethically.
It is interesting to note that the only way to live or think valiantly is to remain silent about what can not be expressed. The unexpressible is the ethically paramount. This implies that, for Wittgenstein, what can be expressed is of little or no ethical substance. Wittgenstein writes that, "of what one can speak, one can speak clearly." But how is this so? If someone addresses me in a very clear articulate way does this guarantee that I have been spoken to "clearly?" Could not the speaker be lying or simply be mis-informed? For Wittgenstein, it does not matter. The only important thing in to live according to sense, and if a statement is sensible, it does not matter if it is factually true or not, nor, it seems, would the repercussions of a non-truth in the world. The world, the expressible, is not the site of ethics. In and of itself, the expressible is without value.
Badiou characterizes this aspect of Wittgenstein's thought as an "ontology of the virtual"- that which is not true, is not of the world, is granted sense. In this, Badiou feels, the "Tractatus" instigates the "Linguistic Turn" in philosophy. And with his ontology, Wittgenstein throws his lot in with all anti-philosophers and sophists- the deposition of the binary "true/false" in favor of "sense/non-sense."
At this point, Badiou begins his assault on the "Tractatus", his defense of philosophy. There is real drama in the ensuing duel.
Badiou's criticisms focus on two points. First, Wittgenstein's understanding of the "sensible" pre-supposes a very conservative, even close-minded, outlook on the world. Secondly, for Wittgenstein's denunciation of metaphysics to hold water, much that would generally be considered forms of thought must be exiled from the category.
Wittgenstein's rejection of "non-sense" is so severe that it give an artificially simplistic idea of the "sensible" or, to put it in more Badiouian terms, the "possible". This implies that what is possible is fully knowable at any one point in history, which Badiou asserts is not a tenable position. The phrase "worker's state" was non-sensicle before the Paris Commune because its signified had not yet been proven possible. But "worker's state" became sensible and its sense changed drastically in the aftermath of the October Revolution. What is sensible corresponds to what is possible and what is possible is constantly being expanded and/or altered by political, scientific, and technological upheavals, i.e. Radical Events.
Badiou also points out that Wittgenstein's use of "sense/ non-sense" is problematic in that it labels all of philosophy as "non-sense" when for millenia readers have found sense in it. This is particularly problematic for Wittgenstein who claims that skepticism is absurd because it asks one to render doubtful what one has already understood as valid.
However, Wittgenstein's is a philosophy (or anti-philosophy) of knowledge, not of history. But the political and technological are far from being the only subjects that Wittgenstein must insist are irrelevant. The mathematical concept of infinity states that what "can be" (and thus what is potentially sensible) cannot be quantified and therefor cannot be measured. Thus, one could never rule out the possibility that there could be "sense" to "non-sense". Badiou states that such mathematical concepts prove that being can be articulated without being experienced, and thus that there is validity to idealism. Wittgenstein's only recourse is to insist that math is not thought, but merely an observation- 2+2=4 (or "simple proposition") proven to be correct, rather than a conjecture about what can be known ("thought").
Badiou then moves in for the kill. Wittgenstein's concept of sense relies on the irrefutability of the understood. Objects have names and the acceptance of these names is an operation of non-thought which is foundational to thought. So naming can never be thought. How then, Badiou asks, does the poem function? Is not poetry simply the act of naming in a new way, at times even the act of announcing something new to be named (an artistic Event)?
If poetry is naming in a new way, and Badiou asks us to accept that it is, then Wittgenstein must say that the poetic, which is to say the aesthetic, is non-thought. How then can the Tractatus, the archi-aesthetic work which seeks to reveal the unexpressible through the perfect, comprehensive expression of the expressible, qualify as thought? If the name is the foundation of the understood, and if new names (and name-ables) can come into being then the understood is elastic, and language can convey a being of which it has no objective experience. Metaphysics is valid.
The entire book is Badiou's attempt to solve a profound philosophical problem- to refute a great anti-philosophical work. The "Tractatus" is a great, beautiful crisis- an Event. It requires that new truths be named- which is to say new philosophical systems formed. For Badiou, the new truth that the Event that is Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn leave behind, what the crisis uncovers, is Badiou's own philosophy.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a result, one begins to doubt whether nomination as such might be a non-thought.
So the answer drifts away, until
And in fact, we can and must maintain that there is a practice of language that is entirely dedicated to naming as thought, that is, poetry.

This book was revelatory. The effect was unexpected. Perhaps I parse and mumble to accommodate my awe at this peculiar point of contact: Badiou has gleaned a strange tradition of anti-philosophy, one at at a distance from both philosophy proper as well as sophistry. Rorty chortles from off stage: a bunch of satirists, and worse.

Dashing this off in paragraphs as my phone is wont to commit itself elsewhere.

Badiou points to the Tractatus as the only published work of Wittgenstein: this both privileges it and excludes it from the notebooks and lectures. Badiou then taunts that very frontier and posits propositions about sense and integrity from both sides of the distinction. That is effective but maddening.

There’s an intersection of ethics and sense and Wittgenstein finds an almost disposable meaning in that.

Interesting that the book features an eighty page translator’s introduction and then a hundred pages of Badiou. There’s a synergy between the two.

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away. Other than providing a very coherent reading of/take on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Badiou also centers on what makes post-structuralism post-structuralism and structuralism structuralism. While he does not speak in these terms, Badiou is able to show very clearly how Wittgenstein anticipates certain high-structuralist concepts while being unable to truly place the antinomies formed by such understandings. Wittgenstein anticipates one of Deleuze's deepest insights (sense) and then is able to recognize that despite (or because of) language having its own logic inherent to it as its own field of consistency, that language can operate independently of what is real, and that difficulty forms for Wittgenstein the end of the logical positivist movement. Wittgenstein is then stuck at in a position he cannot get out of, because sense in language appears accidental when it speaks of reality of non-sense. As such, Wittgenstein retreats towards a kind of mystical intuition.

Additionally, or perhaps more importantly, Badiou is able to characterize the nature of post-structuralism as attempting to incorporate the non-rational aspects of thought itself. Badiou retroactively develops his idea of anti-philosophy more fully, learning the lessons of the unthinkable from post-structuralism, as post-structuralism in its attempt to be rational about the irrational can appear to outsiders to be highly sophistic.

In some sense, Wittgenstein is just one figure, a perhaps interesting but minor figure in the philosophical tradition. The ideas from this book, however, Badiou's framework, as he explores Wittgenstein, is far more significant, and it is for that reason that I would highly recommend this book.

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bruno Bosteels' introduction is a third of the book. And it is not just a translator's note, but a prepared critique. It is Bosteels who, in fact, clearly establishes the battle lines between philosophy, antiphilosophy, and sophistry. Wonder how that makes Badiou feel?

Important points for me:

1. The psychoanalyst as antiphilospher: a psychoanalyst can perceive the philosopher as a desiring subject, and can even, through his 'hermeneutics', understand philosophy as a kind of psychosis, one has to regard psychoanalysts as kind of anti-philosophers.

2. Badiou considers Lacan, especially, as an antiphilospher. If it was Wittgenstein who led to the "linguistic turn," it was Lacan who formalized 'Language = structure,' or 'the unconscious is structured as language.' Badiou sees in this the fearful extension to an idea that says that the world is discourse.

3. If self-divestiture was to be given as an argument for Wittgenstein's being a sophist, where would that put the leaders of Eastern thought? Is Buddha a sophist in the Grecian scheme.

4. The book made me realize that I have always somewhere believed that the philosophy closest to the real is that of the rhetoric. This, of course, also explains my interest in fiction. This text, I'm excited to say, is the delineation of battle lines inside me as well.

5. The most important question asked in the book is by Bruno Bosteels: In this battle of philosophers and antiphilosophers, are we, the bystanders, all sophists, mere cultural relativists?

6. Between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, Badiou draws the distinction of responses to Christianity (rather Christian God). Wittgenstein sides with Christian happiness, insofar as it is a doctrine stressing on the unsayable. Coming from a family of three suicides, the Christian Wittgenstein wants to see suicide as an elemental sin.

7. According to Wittgenstein, the world is contingent. But the sense of the world is non-accidental and outside of it. Badiou bases most of the analysis in the first essay on this basic question

8. I believe Badiou has not done enough to appraise us of what he really intends by positing antiphilosophy. That Bosteels does a better job of that than Badiou in the latter's book is an issue for me.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up this book at City Lights purely out of curiosity, piqued by Slavoj Žižek's blurb: "A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!" This short apothegmatic study of Wittgenstein's "antiphilosophy" is my first exposure to Badiou. I was impressed and entertained.

This book, I suspect, will be of interest to only a few of my fellow goodreaders. If you're interested in the ancient debates of philosophy (e.g. Plato's polemic against the sophists), or if you're interested in Wittgenstein, then I recommend this book. Otherwise…

Briefly* – Badiou places Wittgenstein in the line of those he terms antiphilosophers – Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Lacan – who (philosophically) undermine philosophy's commitment to truth, locating truth outside what philosophy can say or know. I'm quite fond of the first three, so he had my attention there.

People who know only the merest bit of Wittgenstein are still familiar with the closing words of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Badiou dedicates his book to understanding (by contravening) this paradoxical proposition in prose that's hardly calculated to win over the casual reader but richly repays even modest effort. Plus there are unexpected moments of philosophical wit. "The Tractatus is a bit like A Season in Hell written in the form of A Throw of the Dice." Fans of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, take notice.
______________
* For an appealing summary of Badiou's argument, see William West's review below (or above). And although I thought it comical that a translator would require a third of his book to introduce the remainder, Bruno Bosteels did an excellent job.

[Jules Findlay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wittgenstein is the greatest thinker of all time. This collection of two very short essays by Badiou makes it clear that misinterpretation of Wittgenstein's thought is still common, even among lauded contemporary thinkers like Badiou. Essentially Badiou categorises Wittgenstein's early work as 'anti-philosophical' and his later book, philosophical investigations, as 'sophist' (therefore ignoring it). Essentially Badioiu argues his own thought is a reaction to Wittgenstein's 'event', or anti-philosophical position, and advocates for his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Clearly Badiou has much to resolve as he argues that a 'continued dialogue' with Wittgenstein's position is unavoidable.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, quick read, not what one often expects when cracking open a volume by Badiou. I think that its light approach is what threw me off here; indeed, the lengthy translator���s introduction���which is longer and denser than Badiou���s own text���had me expecting Badiou at the height of his syntactical and enigmatic powers.

While the premise of this is intriguing, the format of it may be problematic: originally delivered as a seminar, Badiou lays out his main argument���one that is not too hard to disprove, namely, that Wittgenstein was an antiphilosopher���in his own preface. The rest feels like a rumination on the first opening pages, often extended into repetitive logic. Again, this would work better in a seminar format in order to repeat points to the listeners, but I feel that this failed to be edited properly to work in book format.

Badiou takes Lacan���s term ���antiphilosopher��� and extends its conceptual use: ���I take them to be awakeners who force the other philosophers not to forget two points.��� These two points are, in essence, that the antiphilosopher must force the philosopher not to forget that his or her truths are bearing witness to their own time only, and secondly, that the philosopher situates his voice in the place of a kind of Lacanian Master discourse.

What was most interesting about this point was how Badiou juxtaposes the more ontologically-oriented philosophers with those who are more bodily-oriented���here, he juxtaposes Nietzsche with Wittgenstein, and also seems to suggest that one should read an Althusser/Lacan pairing in the same fashion.

Also of interest is how Badiou situates philosophy���s quest for truth in a more mathematical approach to experience and knowing, a figuring of ���what there is,��� whereas ���the antiphilosophical act consists in letting what there is show itself... If Wittgenstein���s antiphilosophical act can legitimately be declared archiaesthetic, it is because this ���letting-be��� has the nonpropositional form of pure showing, of clarity...���

Again, the main issue I have seems to be the medium here, and also that Badiou���s seminar assumes that the listeners (readers?) are familiar with seminal concepts in both Wittgenstein���s and Nietzche���s oeuvres. Recommended for fans of philosophy, Badiou completists, and those who may need to brush up on their Wittgenstein.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder what Ivan would think of it ? ... Probably repetitive baby-language, in his opinion.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look at Wittgenstein’s Tractus, the only work he published during his lifetime (which for various reasons I have avoided) written by Alain Badiou, whom I also tend to pass by on the book shelf (because, among other reasons, when it comes down to Parmenides and Heraclitus I tend to lean towards the latter).

Badiou sees Wittgenstein as one of the great antiphilosophers of the modern era, and as a philosopher has given a lot of time to engaging antiphilosophy, which he sees as one of philosophy's most important tasks (in terms of proving philosophy's inherent superiority over the ideas of its detractors).

So as a sort of defender of truth and superhero of philosophy, Badiou sets about routing his foe, exposing his worst assumptions and rocking the already shaky antiphilosophical foundations upon which he stands, all to ensure he is taken down several notches. But while doing so Badiou turns out to have a fairly fruitful dialogue with Wittgenstein’s Tractus, and by the end seems to have been influenced by the force of its argument.

Also, cheers to the excellent 70 page introduction by the translator, Bruno Bosteels, for this 180 page book.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Badiou's requirement to interpret texts through this pre-constructed category schema of "antiphilosophy" necessarily flattens out the texts provided this treatment, and this treatment of Wittgenstein is also simply too short to provide a robust interpretation. The sidelining of the PI as mere sophistry (I follow Cassin in having a more favorable outlook towards "sophistical" thinking than Badiou) is also unfortunate. Ultimately, Badiou can only think antiphilosophy from the perspective of philosophy, which necessarily leads to constitutive blindspots in his interpretation.

[Lincoln Day · Rating 1 out of 5]

Such a weird book. It makes absolutely no sense. Weird personal attacks and just the rantings of an insane man. I could not finish it. I could barely even begin.

Why are you talking about 'half-homosexuality'? It makes no sense. There is too much biographical in order to distract from the stupidity of his argument.

He just decided to ignore the most important texts, even texts that were published during Wittgenstein's lifetime, because he didn't like them, but he was more than happy to cherry pick quotes from people's recollections

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

From Bruno Bosteels, translator: "This is the decision between the following two options: either language is seen as possessing a univocal sense capable of capturing being in the discourse of ontology as the science of being qua being, or else language is equivocal from beginning to end, but then the discourse of metaphysics, or ontology, must be replaced with a generalized sophistics, or logology, in which there is no being except what the fictions of language have the power to create."

[Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pesar de rozar continuamente la consideración de Wittgenstein como un segundo Nietzsche, Badiou plantea cuestiones interesantísimas sobre el "Tractatus logico-philosophicus". La segunda parte, en cambio, está llena de extravagancias...

[Zoonanism]

Clever and careful run through some aspects of the Tractatus. I was pleasantly surprised as I am not a fan of Badiou.

[Leonardo]

Para la monografía de Filo del Lenguaje.

[Niel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this incredibly penetrative and provocative reading of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Alain Badiou argues that we are best understanding the early Wittgenstein as a mystical antiphilosopher who's principal concern, in demarcating the limits of language and thought, is in fact to grant an absolute meaning to that which lies beyond language and thought, to that which according to the famous closing words of the Tractatus we "must pass over in silence", namely, the religious. It is here that the true problems of philosophy would reside, instead of the 'puzzles' which he claimed linguistic philosophy must concern itself with.

Badiou's interpretation is backed up be an insightful and incredibly strict reading of Wittgenstein, picking up on details and inconsistencies that have been little discussed in the analytic readings of the Tractatus, and places him in a tradition of 'antiphilosophers' that includes Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

This is a must read for anyone interested in Wittgenstein, especially his mystical side, and is further evidence that Badiou is one of the greatest philosophers writing today.

[Thang Ngo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It might sound wild, but I was introduced to Wittgenstein's thoughts from a Japanese videogame that I really liked. So I was really curious about this book after seeing it in my local library, written by Alain Badiou, a philosopher Zizek considers a genius. While I struggled with this book similar to most "real" philosophy books, I could still finish it and gain some insights. Badiou's triad of philosophy (truths can be articulated)/sophistry (truths in philosophy are always already contained in its own language)/anti-philosophy (meaningful truths can only be lived and felt, not articulable) is very helpful for understanding philosophy at a meta-level. His reading of Wittgenstein is pretty non-mainstream, where he praises the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus as an excellent anti-philosopher ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"), but argues the that late Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations kinda regressed into just a mere sophist (it's all just language games bro!). Amazing short philosophy book

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read with an excellent (even necessary) introduction by Bruno Bosteels. Focused largely on the Tractatus, Badiou makes a very compelling case for Wittgenstein's continuity with other masters of "antiphilosophy" such as Pascal, Nietzsche, and Lacan.

This is not a particularly descriptive review, but Badiou's painstaking analysis of Wittgenstein's positions were refreshing in a way that the few other interpreters I have so far seen seemed to lack.

[CR · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would be tough if you don't understand some basic concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis (e.g., subtraction, act, saying, Real), but altogether a clear, interesting, rigorous, and even 'excellent' work on Wittgenstein's early work (primarily Tractatus)

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angesicht der Klarheit und Knappheit mit der Badiou Wittgensteins Projekt als antiphilosophisch diskreditiert tat Wittgenstein mir schon ein wenig leid.

[Pablo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Copado y cortito el análisis de Badiou.