The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose

by Alain Badiou, Emily Apter (Translator), Bruno Bosteels (Introduction)

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Criticism, Theory

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2014

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

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The editors call Badiou's approach "relentless." One is exposed to a dynamic traffic of nodes, depositions, breaches, delinkings, suspensions, "poetic diagonals" and "capital accomplices," of thoughts which may or may not be thinking. There may be soreness in unfamiliar, simulated muscles. ("Compossibility" is a term that is used, and its apparently a few hundred years old.) In this writing, the poem exists in a condition that is constantly untenable, but the reading of a poem is weirdly normalized in a way that seems appropriate, even essential, a human act constantly on the verge of pretending to be damned or forgotten again.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly rating it on behalf of "Poetry & Communism" & "What Does Lit Think?", which are absolutely tremendous essays. Still unsure what to think about the expansion of Macherey in "Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process".

[Nick Seeger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a deeply insightful collection of essays on both poetry and prose. Perhaps too deep for me to fully comprehend the nuance of Badiou's discourse. The two essays I liked the most were "What does a poem think?" and "What does Literature think?".

With regards to the former, much of his argument turns on the premise that what remains after a poem is translated is the thought of the poem, not knowledge specifically, as knowledge needs an object, and a poem is divested of it's object in the dual process of subtraction and dissemination.

Subtraction is what assembles the poem with the direct aim of a withdrawal of the object; the poem is a negative machine, which states being, or the idea, at the very point where the object has vanished

Dissemination, for it's part, seeks to dissolve the object by way of it's infinite metaphorical distribution

As for the latter, my understanding is less clear, although I am certain he is on to something profound. He posits a chart with axes for Language and Reality, respectively. Any use of language to represent reality will be charted as a point on the graph, and a phrase would be a movement between points, thus forming a curve. This is where it gets hazy for me: Any successful narrative will encircle itself thus forming a closed loop at whose intersection one could identify what German romanticists called the "Literary Absolute ".



I think there's some value to reading works that extend your understanding of a subject, and this one was indeed a stretch. I enjoyed it, but may find it more rewarding upon successive reads.

[Rhys · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What is an Idea in this context? The Idea is properly the thought that is not a thought of thought: thought subtracted from the mediation of the cogito. Thought becomes a corridor as soon as it establishes itself only in relation to itself. For the poem as thought, it is a matter of not borrowing the path of this corridor, and thus of enduring directly a speech which is such that, between thought as Idea and the Earth, we do not have the time of thought’s closure onto itself." And so on ...

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, but it did at times seem very esoteric.
I understand to a degree how theory is written, especially in literary contexts, but I do always find it tough to grapple with works that feel intentionally obscure at times. It's okay to write concisely and simply! It doesn't make you less intelligent!

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of it was interesting.