Articles by Alain Badiou
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Roads to Renegacy
NLR 53, September-October 2008, pp. 125-133in
Subjects: Biography and Intellectual History , France
A philosophe engagé discusses the ‘wrong turn’ taken by so many erstwhile French Maoists, locating its sources within the landscape of 1970s militancy. The perils of politics as ambition, as fashion, as absolute—paving a mediatized path from 68 to Sarkozy.
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Also available in Spanish -
The Communist Hypothesis
NLR 49, January-February 2008, pp. 29-42in
Subjects: Communist Movement , France , Philosophy
Why does the spectre of May 68 still haunt French discourse? Alain Badiou on the country’s longue durée sequences of restoration and revolt, and the place of Sarkozy’s presidency within them. Lessons in political courage from Plato and Corneille, and a call to reassert the Manifesto’s founding wager.
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Also available in Spanish and Polish -
The Adventure of French Philosophy
NLR 35, September-October 2005, pp. 67-77in
Subjects: France , Philosophy
French philosophy from the 1940s to the 1990s viewed as a third exceptional moment in the history of the discipline, after classical Greece and enlightenment Germany. Alain Badiou takes four coordinates for a tour de force of terse analysis: the antecedents of this moment, the enterprises it launched, the links it forged with literature, and the relations it developed with psychoanalysis.
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Also available in Spanish