Badiou and the Political Condition

Marios Constantinou received his PhD from The New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently an independent researcher. He has edited 2 journal special issues, Space and Event (special issue on Badiou), for the journal Environment and Planning, Pion Publications, 2009 and Imperial Affect for Parallax (Routledge, 2012). He has also contributed numerous chapters in books on the work of Alain Badiou.

• Introduction; Forcing Politics: Badiou’s Anabasis In the Age of Empire, Marios Constantinou; Part I: The Crisis of Negation And The Political Condition; 1. From Logic to Anthropology: Affirmative Dialectics, Alain Badiou; 2. Conditioning Communism: Badiou, Plato and Philosophy as Meta-Critical Anamnesis, Frank Ruda; 3. The Narrative Politics of Active Number, Ed Pluth; 4. The Pascalian Wager of Politics: Remarks on Badiou and Lacan, Dominiek Hoens; 5. Contra Opinionem: Politics as an Anti-Imperialist Procedure, Marios Constantinou; Part II: Compossibilities: Conditions of Philosophy in the Wake of Politics; 6. Reversing and Affirming the Avant-Gardes: A New Paradigm for Politics, Jan Voelker; 7. Badiou on Inaesthetics and Transitory Ontology: The Case of Political Song, Christopher Norris; 8. Love in the Time of the Communist Hypothesis, Norman Madarasz; 9. The Politics of Comradeship: Philosophical Commitment and Construction in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Sean Homer; 10. Not Solvable by Radicals: Lacan, Topology, Politics, A. J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens; Bibliography; Index.

These essays explicate, critique, and extend key ideas in the political thought of Alain Badiou. That achievement alone makes the collection important. The breadth and clarity of the contributions – which take up art, music, psychoanalysis, and love as well as biopolitics, miltancy, revolution, and communism – make it necessary.