Briefings on Existence

Alain Badiou is Director of the Department of Philosophy at École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Several of his works have been translated into English, including Manifesto for Philosophy, also published by SUNY Press and also translated by Norman Madarasz, who is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Universidade Gama Filho, Brazil.

• Preface to the English-language EdtionTranslator’s Introduction: Alain Badiou: Back to the Mathematical LinePrologue: God is Dead1. The Question of Being Today2. Mathematics is a Thought3. The Event as Trans-Being4. Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology5. Spinoza’s Closed Ontology6. Platonism and Mathematical Ontology7. The Aristotelian Orientation and Logic8. Logic, Philosophy, "Linguistic Turn"9. First Remarks on the Concept of Topos 10. First Provisional Theses on Logic11. The Being of Number12. Kant’s Subtractive Ontology13. Group, Category, Subject14. Being and Appearing AnnexNotesContributorsIndex

"…this book reveals a great deal about the development of the ideas that have begun and will continue to occupy the debates within Badiou scholarship and Continental philosophy more generally." — Symposium"It is important and timely that this book has been published in its entirety." — Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy"Twice in its history, philosophy has arisen from the sophists' threat: first with Plato and then again with Kant, who saved it from Humean skepticism. Today, when we again live in an era of globalized sophism (deconstructionist relativism, finite "weak thought"), Alain Badiou's project is no less than to repeat the Platonic-Kantian move, and to reestablish philosophy as the theory of universal Truth. The task is immense—and the miracle is that Badiou effectively delivers what he promises. For this reason alone, Badiou's thought is the single most important event in contemporary philosophy." — Slavoj Zðizûek"There is little doubt that Alain Badiou is one of contemporary philosophy's most challenging and controversial figures. He approaches philosophy with the recalcitrant rigor of a mathematician and the economy of means of a modern poet, but also with the passion of a militant of truth. Knotting together philosophical and mathematical discourses, his writing renews their traditional alliance and asks fundamental questions of each, while also dramatizing the incommensurability that sets the two discourses apart." — Gabriel Riera, editor of Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions