Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy

by Alain Badiou, David Macey (Translator)

Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today’s leading political and philosophical minds. Alain Badiou draws on his encounters with this pantheon – his teachers, opponents and allies – to offer unique insights into both the authors and their work. These studies form an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Essays, Contemporary, France

196 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 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

[Mac · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was introduced to Alain Badiou via an extremely brief piece on film criticism that was, I’ll say, pretty good. It gave a reasonable and persuasive account of how one should critique a piece of art, and to this day I still try and use the techniques we discussed in that class when I think about work I’m reading or looking at or having foisted upon myself.

So, I wanted to read something by Badiou that was more than an excerpt, and I didn’t really want to jump into the middle of “Being and Event” (having had enough fun with “Being and Time” and “Being and Nothingness,” and also having read each of those long enough ago to not really be up on what’s cool in continental philosophy these days). So I happened upon “Pocket Pantheon,” which seemed like it might accomplish a few things at once. It’s billed as “an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought,” which sounds like exactly what I was looking for. Authoritative, accessible, distillation – sounds like tasty French vodka to me.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite so. Collected here are not introductory essays about eleven philosophers from post-war France, but eleven eulogies of one sort or another, each coming from a different publication or event and each with an entirely different audience from the one preceding it. In some cases, we have a five-to-ten page sketch, based mostly on personal stories and loosely connected to ideas. In others, we are given a thirty-page discussion of very specific aspects of a thinkers’ work – with Sartre, for instance, we get no overview of his evolution as a thinker, just a head-first-into-the-deep-end analysis of his later dialectical methods and materialism. It’s also clear when a piece was given as a speech to a group, as opposed to when it was written for a journal or tribute collection (and though Derrida is one of his subjects, I’ll stay away from the speech/writing deconstruction) – the speeches are considerably more succinct and direct, whereas the written work has a particularly Gallic quality that seems to reflect the obscurity of the subject. It makes for a very uneven book in tone, substance, and style.

None of this is strictly Badiou’s fault – the pieces were not being written, over the span of more than thirty years, with the idea of collecting them into a small volume in 2009 and publishing it as some kind of introduction to continental thought – and so my problem is more with the marketing team at Verso who wrote the jacket copy. I still am interested in writers like Lacan and Althusser and Foucault (and even Badiou himself – I’ve not been scared away quite yet), but what is collected in “Pocket Pantheon” is less of a preface to these thinkers’ works than a collection of afterwords – better appreciated by those who have already been there, rather than the newbies.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The description of the English edition is not very good. This is not a "journey through 20th-century philosophy," as such, but rather a collection of short tributes to leading French philosophers that Alain Badiou knew (to some degree) personally, in each case presented or published shortly after their deaths. It is not comprehensive; it is arguable if it even has much in the way of historicity. What it does feature is a selection of reflections on the work and contributions of fourteen remarkable thinkers, mixed with a dose of pathos and eccentricity.

The difficulty of each piece varies widely. In some essays, not much training in philosophy is necessary to follow the thread of Badiou's remarks; in others he burrows deep into what will sound like opaque jargon to non-specialists. I think there are points in which his views of the meaningful contributions of his former colleagues are very insightful, and would be helpful to anyone wanting to learn more about this generation of French philosophers. I would not recommend this, though, as a primer of any sort.

One idiosyncrasy of this volume is that in his various encomiums, Badiou has a habit of differentiating himself from the concepts of his subject near the end of every essay. Sometimes this has the tone of a clarification about his personal bias; other times it makes his prior homage seem to lose part of its sincerity. This comes across as particularly strange when he follows that immediately with some very grief-laden final dedication to mourning.

All together, I enjoyed this as a reading of these philosophers, in brief, VIA Alain Badiou. In some cases, though, it has only whet my appetite for the work of the thinkers themselves.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of Badiou's reminiscences and memorials for late peers in the French philosophy game. Here's the thing-- as everyone knows, Verso has a little bit of a reputation for grubbing after money and riding a few cash-horses (like Zizek and, I suppose Badiou) in a way unbecoming of their leftist ethos. I personally sort of roll my eyes when somebody comes around with these accusations, but in reading this I did find myself wondering what the utility of this book was, and why it merited such a lavish hardcover release.

Some of the pieces are really good. The pieces on Althusser and Sartre are terrific. But many of his subjects, maybe a bit over half if I recall, are not and have never been in print in English, and if they, in expensive and out of print university editions. Why market an essay on Canguilhem & Cavailles to readers that will probably never read them, especially when those essays (which presume a deal of familiarity with the subjects) do little to kindle an interest in tracking down the authors' works?

The whole package feels a little superfluous. It's neat to have, and well written, I love Badiou, but I sort of envisage the product being better served as a little pocket-paperback or even a series of PDFs on the Verso site.

[Joel Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

// some good short bits ...

On Deleuze: “consensus is just tired reasoning”
On Derrida: “he liked to unclose closed things”
On Sartre: “how can activity, the only model for which is the free individual consciousness, be a collective given ... how can we escape the idea that any historical and social reality is inevitably passive?”

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

A joke of a book. Some of the worst writing I’ve ever read.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a quick read that's a tour through 20th century French philosophy. Many of the people discussed were Badiou's friends and teachers. Philosophers discussed include Jacques Lacan, Georges Canguilhem & Jean Cavailles, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Borreil, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, Gilles Chatalet, and Francois Proust. I've never read Canguilhem & Cavailles, Hyppolite, Borreil, Lacou-Labarthe (other than his work with Jean-Luc Nancy, which isn't Lacou-Labarthe on his own), Chatelet, or Proust, so I can't comment on how well Badiou represents them, but I did enjoy it. As for Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, Badiou seemed fairly accurate and always interesting, though it's been some time since I've read most of them. He also seemed to be spending a lot of time explicating and perhaps arguing against Deleuze. For the Loyola readers, as for Jean Hyppolite, he was on Adrianne Peperzak's dissertation committee (although Paul Ricoeur directed it).

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully designed and quirky book by French philosopher Alain Badiou. It's basically him riffing off his fellow contributors to the school of thinking and thought. All French, all controversial, all uber-aware of the world that we live in - and this small handy book is sort of a perfect bathtub book for me. Each chapter is devoted to one individual - and at times Badiou argues with their thoughts, yet shows great respect to those who walked among and before him.

[Ryan Farrow · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit glad to be done with this book, and not only because some of it was obscure and impenetrable to me. Contrary to the insistence on the rear cover, this is not an “accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory”, though admittedly I was aware of this before purchasing it, having read a few reviews beforehand. What's really contained in this collection is the opposite; 13 essay-eulogies dedicated to lost French philosophers, most of which were contemporaries of the author’s and were personally known to or extremely influential on him.

The physical construction of this book is quite cool; it's a small hardcover with an appearance not too dissimilar to a pocket bible, and best of all it actually does fit inside a regular pocket. I appreciate that it's built to last and to travel, so kudos to Verso for that. As for the content, this is far from accessible, with a proliferation of complex terminology and specific historical, political, local and literary references (which makes sense given these disparate pages are addressed to audiences intimately familiar with the figures and philosophies addressed). I missed a lot, no doubt, but in addition some of it was just straight up unengaging for someone unfamiliar with most of the people included. That's not necessarily a point against the book, objectively, but at the same time this is a collation of passages and speeches collected across the years, and far from a complete or logical work, so that should be taken into account for anyone curious.

So why did I read this book? Well, because I was curious mostly. I've followed Badiou’s non-literary work to some degree and wanted to see what his writing was like. I knew this wasn't an introduction per se, but I was also intrigued by an “on-the-ground” account of French philosophical climates and on that front at least this did deliver. There were about 3-4 of the texts which yielded very little to me, a smattering that I understood but which bored me, and a handful that I would call positively experienced by myself. I'll briefly address the latter of these categories and leave the rest un-criticised for the time being, for reasons littered in the above review. In order: the chapter on Lacan which opens the book was short, but interesting enough. Of all those addressed in this book, he's the figure I know the most about, so I was both pleasantly introduced to the book, and disappointed that his presence within it was so brief; the Sartre chapter was also interesting, offering a pretty unique perspective on the man; the Hippolite chapter which follows was one of the more enjoyable for sure. Much more personal and subjective then the rest, it was better off for it; finally the chapter on Borreil and his literature analyses actually makes him the only philosopher here that I was not previously aware of that I subsequently am excited to delve deeper into. Probably my favourite chapter here.

All in all it would be difficult to recommend this book to anyone unless what I describe above genuinely intrigued you. I'll probably return to this some time in the future, when I'm more knowledgable on the figures and context that permeate this work, but for now I'm in no hurry to dwell on what I read. This is between a 2 and a 3 for me, but it gets the benefit of the doubt since I'm mostly culpable for not being more engaged and being arrogant enough to assume I could pull more from it without being very familiar with what was in store.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should begin by saying that Verso's advertising/blurbing of books by Badiou remains frustratingly inaccurate - although in this case I was fortunately not surprised. Suffice to say that this is by no means an introduction to the key figures of postwar philosophy; if it was, it would be appallingly French and - with the exception of the final chapter on Francoise Proust- male. That does still grate, and it is somewhat shocking that there are no chapters at least on, say, De Beauvoir or Wittig. But it is less of a problem because his intent is not to provide an introduction to postwar philosophy, but to commemorate (and the book is largely a collection of previously published essays and obituaries) the lives of philosophers that he has known - in spite of his opening claim that "neither death nor depression should be of interest to us", most of the essays are preoccupied with exactly those questions. That shouldn't be surprising, as Badiou himself nears the end of his life - aware of his status as the last of the youngest generation of philosophers active in 1968. At times the book shows signs of Badiou's own retreat into the position of public intellectual - there's a sense that he wants to help create a French canon - but it also includes forceful statements of political commitment which I think remain genuine. His comments on these philosophers are interesting enough as philosophy, but also as history - as fragments of relationships which remind us that philosophy is a world as much as a field. Whilst you're unlikely to learn a great deal about Sarte or Derrida from what Badiou writes - unless you had a good grounding already - the book is actually pretty readable as an introduction to Badiou; he has rather more to say here about e.g. truth-procedures and mathematics than he did in books that I'd consider more explicitly introductory (Philosophy for Militants, or the Communist Hypothesis). It should also be said that, as little as you might glean from the text of the chapters themselves, there is enough here to pique interest in French philosophers who decidedly aren't read much in Britain - if they are translated at all - and it's worth reading (it is, after all, quite cheap) just for those moments of discovery.

[Keen Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Utter selfishness(now known as ‘modern individualism’)”

To be fair Badiou is very bold in his claims during his intro, but the problem is that he consistently fails to back them up. His brief spiel at the start is by far the best part of this book. This is a puzzling offering, talk about some dead French intellectuals in vague, frustrating ways, without ever clearly saying anything and occasionally throw in the odd dull anectdote or tenuous connection which reveals nothing and that’s pretty much it.

“Those who claim that the human animal is wicked simply want to tame it and turn it into a morose wage earner or depressed consumer who helps capital to circulate.”

You know that way with certain works of philosophy, where a lot of words are being said to actually say very little at all?...Well there’s a lot of that going on in here. I suppose in many ways philosophy can be like politics in that it gives you license to say nothing of substance by using an awful lot of words, and then when you’re finished and see the confusion of your audience you can claim to be profound, no matter how poor or unintelligible your words. After all why do you think so many politicians study degrees in PPE?...

[Jared Perovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of France’s living and most prolific philosophers is Alain Badiou. His Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (2009 from Verso Books) consists of thirteen “tributes to philosophers who are no longer with us” (preface, p. vii). Among them are Badiou’s contemporaries of the 1960s, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For the eulogies in his Pantheon book, Alain Badiou nearly chose the title “Funeral Orations,” yet he achieves far more than a desire to smooth over the past. Each chapter recovers the essential features of affinity and rivalry in the postwar era of French philosophy. Badiou is first to admit his debt to three masters: Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan. These three chapters especially make Badiou's Pocket Pantheon well worth reading repeatedly.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Izvrsni tekstovi o autorima fre(n)ch theory. Knjiga zamisljena kao katekizam

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sartre is a badass.

[A L]

What a sweet introduction.