Alain Badiou & Judith Balso. Contemporary art: considered philosophically and poetologically. 2014

• published: 01 Oct 2014
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http://www.egs.edu/ Alain Badiou and Judith Balso, French philosopher and poet discussing the nature of contemporary art, contemporaneity and the dual tenets of modern art, subtraction and formalization. Other topics include modernity, music, painting, rupture, event, poetry. In relation to the authors Hegel, Osip Mandelstam, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer and Dante. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2014 Alain Badiou and Judith Balso. Alain Badiou (b. 1937, Rabat, Morocco) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, to which he later returned, to become the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Alain Badiou has also taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), and continues to do so at the Collège International de Philosophie. Badiou was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party, which was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. To this day, Badiou remains both a member of the Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), and at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a 'post-party organization' concerned with direct popular intervention in social and political issues. 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. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, among them in English are Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2000), On Beckett (2003), Being and Event (2005), Number and Numbers (2008), The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008), Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2 (2009), Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (2009), Theory of the Subject (2009), The Communist Hypothesis (2010), and Five Lessons on Wagner (2010), The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012) and Philosophy For Militants (2012). Judith Balso, Ph.D., is a professor of poetry at the European Graduate School EGS, where she conducts an annual workshop on poetry with an established poet. Each year she brings in a different poet to talk about their work and the poetic process. Among the poets she has invited in the past are Jacques Roubaud, Alessandro De Francesco, and Philippe Beck. Judith Balso received her Ph.D. from Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg in 1997. She currently teaches at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris and at the European Graduate School EGS. Judith Balso's intellectual work revolves around a study of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. She is the author of Pessoa, le passeur métaphysique (2006), Le Portugal de près: Textes et documents (1976), and Pessoa (Les conférences du Perroquet) (1991). Judith Balso is also active politically and has been writing in the name of emancipatory politics since the 1970s. More recently, she has insisted on creating new political movements distanced from the state. Judith Balso gives a unique and emancipatory perspecitve to the timeless questions of politics and philosophy. Through a unique and rigirous perspective her work shines a new light on important questions of our time.