Condiciones

by Alain Badiou

Reúne textos posteriores a su libro fundamental, El ser y el acontecimiento. Aunque el origen de estos escritos sea a menudo de circunstancia, su orden es perfectamente legible. Se parte de la “filosofía y en sí misma”, partiendo de una definición de ella a la vez nueva y sometida a la prueba de su origen, así como de su estado contemporáneo. Siguen estudios ordenados según las cuatro grandes condiciones de la filosofí filosofía y poesía; filosofía y matemáticas; filosofía y política, y filosofía y amor.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several of these essays are otherwise available (notably in the "Theoretical Writings" collection, also published by Continuum). Nonetheless, the final essay on Beckett makes the whole book worth buying or stealing.

[Jasper L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of Badiou’s post-B&E takeover. Found it helpful to refine and focus on some specific concepts from Being and Event as they were framed in different ways and discussed with different referents in mind.

Favourite Essays:
- What is a Philosophical Institution? Or Address, Transmission, Inscription
- On Subtraction
- What is Love?
- The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett

Least favourite essay:
- Anti-Philosophy: Plato & Lacan (soz)

[sdv duras · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a marvellous collection of essays that simply demands to be read alongside Badiou's Being and Event. Wonderful.

[Ariadna73 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know, I know. You are about to ask me why I keep reading books like this, that I hardly understand. I keep asking myself the exact same question. I can't come with a satisfactory answer, except that this kind of difficulty exerts a great fascination in my mind. Figure the moth and the fire. I am always admired of how there are people in this world that understand such complicated topics.

I try time and again because I have noticed during my life that I came to understand certain things long time after I was taught about them. that happened with the concept of limits, the derivatives, why my first boyfriend made me suffer so much. I think that if I read these kinds of books, and keep their words in my brain, somehow, sometime things will fall into place and I will feel the pleasure of understanding.

After all, how can there exist people out there that truly understand these topics? Or do they? Isn't this something closer to a war of egos than a real philosophical exchange? What if all those pages and rivers of ink written about this book and this thinker are just babling from people that have as much idea as I do? I have to find out, and the only way is trying to work this book out.

This is the cover of the book I read (or tried to)



Other interesting titles..



Editorial page



Contents. This can help a little bit. The author will try to define philosophy and then will try to find the relationship between philosophy and poetry, politics, love, pschycoanalysis, and then, he will make a disertation on genre (yes, masculine vs. femenine. ain't that fascinating yet?)



The preface. A long, long, long disertation on this author, his thoughts, and the preface's author vision of Badiou philosophy. What can I say? I tried, I promise.









Acknowledgements and thanks to everybody. Many of them must be executive producers. I really can't imagine trying to do this work without a solid financial support.



A couple of pages, so you can 'hear' the author's 'voice' a little bit:





Here is a gruesome description of a victim. I think this philosopher is like a vivisector. He doesn't care about pain. He will cut his own arm open if he wanted to solve a question about it.



A couple of words on the passage to death. Honestly, this is better than any horror movie I have ever seen:



Here is a definition of philosphy. I really liked it: "Philosophy is the evoction, under the category of Truth, of a void that is located in accordance with the inversion of a succession and the other-side of a limit." Beautiful!









And here, at last! a diagram. This depicts the trajectory of truth. Don't ask. Just memorize the diagram and maybe in a million years you will understand it, and then, please, explain it to me.



A poem by Mallarmé. Again, don't ask.



And my favorite diagram of the book: a comparison between men and women, on how they envision humanity. As you can see in the left, women see humanity as an oval layered with a simple rope; whereas the much more complex brain of men envision humanity as an intrincate network of connections. Everything is clear to me now.



Well, I will keep this book under my bed until the day I understand it. I really work its pages one at a time, but this concepts are a very hard bite to chew.

***

I also have a blog! Link here:

http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com