Images of the Present Time

by Alain Badiou, Susan Spitzer (Translator), Kenneth Reinhard (Introduction)

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of “the present.” In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one’s own time―that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou’s seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds , the second of the three volumes of Being and Event , these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.

Featuring some of the philosopher’s most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou’s thought.

Genres: Philosophy

472 pages, Hardcover

Published January 31, 2023

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

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books is a collection of public seminars Badiou gave in 2001-2003. This also happens to be around the same time that Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds(2006). This book reads very similar to The Century but presents Badiou's thinking in a more contemporary setting as it spends sometime facing up to the world of the Iraq War and America's war on Terrorism.

Badiou's main arguments from this series are that the exercise of power in democratic societies is about the separation of bodies from Ideas. What democratic society does to humanity is isolate and atomize people into individuals with no collective ambition for organizing politically, but instead reduces them to consumers on the market place, chasing youthful ideals under a veil of nihilism.

Badiou's position is that truths are still possible as a radical exception to what 'there is'. Specifically that art, politics, science, and love offer humans the chance to participate in the creation of a truth, to bear the consequences of an Event through subjective fidelity. What each truth procedure offers is an orientation for the subject: demonstration, contemplation, action, and passion. These are opposed to the opinions which dominate and circulate society: the discussion of opinion, or judgement, management and consumption.

Badiou's positions sets him at odds not only with capitalist democracy, but with several philosophers he engages throughout the book. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben to name them. One of the most significant disagreements that Badiou has is regarding the role of Life as a philosophical concept, that Life presents itself as something that should be left alone to spontaneously develop on its own without intervention from governing forces. For Badiou, this kind of thinking remains consistent with dominant order, or what he terms the position that 'there are only bodies and language'. Badiou calls this position 'democratic materialism'.

Badiou takes a side against 'democratic materialism', not by an out right rejection, but by arguing that truths are an exception to this order of things. That truths create an exception which radically redefines the possibility of what is possible in the world. Badiou introduces his idea of an Event occurs when a certain part of the world which exists with a minimal intensity suddenly gains maximal intensity. The key part is that this shift occurs as an immanent exception to the 'transcendental' laws which structure appearance. A decade later, Badiou will make the Egyptian Revolution at Tahir square an example of this happening.

Badiou takes great care to rigorously distinguish the Event as something that happens through chance without consigning it to something of the status of a miracle, something which one waits for. "Only those who do something other than wait for a miracle are deserving of it"(102). Badiou accounts for an entire trajectory of thinking and action as response to an Event happening in seven points: the site, the trace, incorporation, the body, process, efficacious part of the body, organs(390-395).

One of Badiou's points about the world as we know it in democratic society is that there simply is no world. We are confronted with a world everything is in a constant state of crisis and panic yet nothing ever changes we're only supplemented with new ways to seek enjoyment the fundamental nihilism which pervades everything. Or worse, a kind of new spiritualism that anticipates the coming of a salvation in the vein of Heidegger's God that will save us.

Badiou puts forward a position that the present time remains alienated by the past(as repetition) and future(as projection) and that to really live is to make a declaration for the present to live with prospect of an Idea that can exist though the unfolding of an Event which remains indifferent to the world which would refuse to know truths.

Like any good thinker, a philosopher worthy of the title, Badiou's presents a wealth of ideas and insights that worth engaging with. But like any good thinker, their ideas remain insufficient, not useless, but insufficient until they are taken up into practice. Badiou does account for what something like a practice related to the Event would be. I still find Badiou to be an inspirational figure and recommend this book for its clarity in a public format and contemporary engagement with the world.