[Ideas] perfil de A.Badiou

[cesar barretto]

                EGS Home  MA in Communication  PhD in Communication  Admin  FAQ  Faculty  EGS Store     EGS Online                               [input]    [input]                                   European Graduate School Faculty                      Alain Badiou
Biography | Lectures | Bibliography | Resources | Links
          Biography         
          
          Alain Badiou is a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches an Intensive Summer Seminar.
    Alain Badiou, Ph.D, born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, 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 Chaire 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 centre 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, Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
  Unlike many of those schooled in the anti-humanist principles of Althusser and Lacan, Badiou has never been tempted to celebrate the apparent end of philosophy, to question the possibility of metaphysics, or to qualify the classical attributes of truth: rigor, clarity, and eternity.
  As Badiou explains in detail in his major work to date L'Etre et l'événement (1988), truths are militant processes which, beginning from a specific time and place within a situation, pursue the step-by-step transformation of that situation in line with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles. Only a pure commitment, one detached from any psychological, social or 'objective' mediation, can qualify as the adequate vehicle for a truth, but reciprocally, only a properly universal truth qualifies as worthy of such a commitment. Only a truth can 'induce' the subject of a genuine commitment.
  Badiou's most general goal can be described, then, as the effort to expose and make sense of the potential for profound, transformative innovation in any situation. Every such innovation can only begin with some sort of exceptional (though invariably ephemeral) break with the status quo, an 'event'. An event can occur at any time but not in just any place; an event will generally be located close to the edge of whatever qualifies as 'void' or indistinguishable in the situation, i.e. in that part of the situation where for literally fundamental reasons the prevailing forms of discernment and recognition cease to have any significant purchase. A truth then expands out of this 'evental site' (site événementiel) insofar as it elicits the militant conviction of certain individuals who develop the revolutionary implications of the event, and by doing so constitute themselves as the subjects of its truth. A subject is thus anyone carried by his or her fidelity to the consequences, as
 rigorous as they are haphazard, of an event, while a truth is nothing other than the cumulative collection of such post-evental consequences. The laborious, case-by-case application of these consequences will then serve to transform the entire way the situation organizes and represents itself, in keeping with the implications of the event.
  An ordinary individual, or 'some-one,' only becomes a genuine subject insofar as he or she is caught up in a materially transformative procedure of this kind. By the same token (for reasons sketched in Badiou's most accessible short work, L'Ethique (1993), subjects only remain subjects insofar as their fidelity is in turn equipped to resist the various sorts of corruption it must inevitably face: fatigue, confusion, and dogmatism. For example, those mobilized by the civil rights, feminist or anti-colonial movements remain true subjects insofar as these movements, initially sparked by certain events affecting particular groups of people in particular situations, call for the transformation of the situation as a whole in terms that can be directly and universally affirmed by its every inhabitant. But should such a movement seek simply the promotion of a particular group for its own sake, then its partisans act only as the proponents of an interest in competition with other interests.
 The identification of suffering victims is not by itself the sufficient basis, Badiou insists, for a genuine political movement. Like all truths, politics must proceed in a sphere of rigorous universality, on the basis of statements that literally anyone could make or affirm.
This doesn't mean, however, that truth operates in the domain of consensus or communication. Every genuinely universal principle has its origin in an active and precisely situated taking of sides; every true affirmation of the universal interest begins as divisive. There is no philosopher more opposed to the 'ethical' coordination of opinions or differences than Badiou.
  Badiou distinguishes four general fields of truth, or four domains of subjectivation (which in turn operate as the four generic 'conditions' of philosophy itself): politics, science, art and love. These are the only four fields in which a pure subjective commitment is possible, i.e. one indifferent to procedures of interpretation, representation or verification. Badiou provides his most concise overview of the generic procedures in his Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989). True politics is a matter of collective mobilization guided by a 'general will' in something like Rousseau's sense, and not the business of bureaucratic administration or the socialized negotiation of interests. Within the limits of the private sphere, genuine love begins in the wake of an unpredictable encounter that escapes the conventional representation of sexual roles, continues as a fidelity to the consequences of that encounter, and is sustained through an unrepresentable exposure to what Lacan famously
 described as the 'impossibility of a sexual relationship'. True art and true science proceed in somewhat the same way, through a searching experimental fidelity to a line of enquiry opened up by a new discovery or break with tradition. Mathematics is then the most 'truthful' component of science simply because, thanks to its axiomatic foundation in the basic postulates of set theory, it is the most securely abstracted from any natural or objective mediation.
  In the end, every truth is 'founded' only on the fundamental 'inconsistency' that Badiou discerns as the exclusive and insubstantial stuff of pure being qua being — the generic being of all that is simply insofar as it is, but that is only exceptionally accessible, through the rare commitment of those who become subjects in the wake of its evental exposure.

      
    document.write(footer)    All material herein Copyright © 1997 –05. European Graduate School EGS. All Rights Reserved. The source code is owned by the European Graduate School and is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The source code is licensed, not sold. All right, title and interest in the source code (including any images, applets, photographs, animations, video, audio, music, and text incorporated into the source code), accompanying printed materials, and any copies you are permitted to make herein, are owned by the European Graduate School EGS, and the source code is protected by United States copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, the source code must be treated like any other copyrighted material.

European Graduate School EGS • Media and Communications • 158 East 7th St C 5 • New York, NY 10009 • USA •
Phone: +1 (212) 254 5267 • Fax +1 (646) 365 3120 • web: http://www.egs.edu.
Questions/comments/suggestions to info en egs.edu Last modified 09/13/2005 01:23:25 GMT -05:00;
The URL is http://egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html.

  

                  Top of this Page — European Graduate School Homepage  EGS Sitemap                  
EGS FACULTY
Giorgio Agamben
Chantal Akerman
Pierre Aubenque
Alain Badiou
Judith Balso
Lewis Baltz
Nicholson Baker
Jean Baudrillard
Yve-Alain Bois
Catherine Breillat
Victor Burgin
Judith Butler
Sophie Calle
Hélène Cixous
Diane Davis
Michel Deguy
Manuel DeLanda
Claire Denis
Jacques Derrida
Atom Egoyan
Tracey Emin
Chris Fynsk
Peter Greenaway
Durs Grünbein
Werner Hamacher
Barbara Hammer
Donna Haraway
Michael Hardt
Martin Hielscher
Michel Houellebecq
Shelley Jackson
Jim Jarmusch
Freidrich Kittler
Claude Lanzmann
David Lynch
Greg Lynn
Carl Mitcham
Jean-Luc Nancy
Antonio Negri
François Ozon
Cornelia Parker
Laurence Rickels
Avital Ronell
Martha Rosler
Wolfgang Schirmacher
Volker Schlöndorff
Michael Schmidt
Hendrik Speck
DJ Spooky/Paul Miller
Bruce Sterling
Sandy Stone
Fred Ulfers
Gregory Ulmer
Agnès Varda
Victor Vitanza
H. von Amelunxen
John Waters
Samuel Weber
Krzysztof Zanussi
Siegfried Zielinski
Slavoj Zizek

                     
  
  
          EGS Home
          MA in Communication
          PhD in Communication
          Admin
          FAQ
          Faculty
          EGS Store
          EGS Online

    
"LEMA, Fernando" <lema en mec.gub.uy> escribió:      Cesar, sería conveniente tener a mano un CV de Badiou antes de reunirnos,
   
  Un gran abrazo
   
  Fernando
    -----Mensaje original-----
De: cesar barretto [mailto:cesarbarretto en yahoo.com.ar]
Enviado el: Jueves, 02 de Febrero de 2006 03:51 p.m.
Para: ideas en listas.montevideo.net.uy
Asunto: [Ideas] Badiou en setiembre?


  Queridos todos,hemos hecho contactos durante este enero playero y tenemos la respuesta afirmativa del filósofo y matemático Alain Badiou para venir a Uruguay en setiembre del 2006.El tiene agendada una visita a Bs AS en esa fecha lo cual facilita mucho las cosas.Lo estudiamos en cuanto nos reunamos,ok?
  abrazos,César
    
---------------------------------
  1GB gratis, Antivirus y Antispam
Correo Yahoo!, el mejor correo web del mundo
Abrí tu cuenta aquí


		
---------------------------------
 1GB gratis, Antivirus y Antispam
 Correo Yahoo!, el mejor correo web del mundo
 Abrí tu cuenta aquí
------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: http://listas.montevideo.net.uy/pipermail/ideas/attachments/20060202/f38aed32/attachment-0001.html