Malebranche

Alain Badiou is emeritus professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His Columbia University Press books include Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters (2015) and Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (2018).Jason E. Smith is chair of the Graduate Art MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. He has written widely on contemporary philosophy and translated Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue (Columbia, 2014). He is currently writing a book on automation and work.Susan Spitzer is a frequent translator of Badiou’s works.

• Editors’ Introduction to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain BadiouAuthor’s General Preface to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain BadiouIntroduction to the Seminar on Malebranche: Malebranche’s “Political Ontology”(Jason E. Smith)About the 1986 Seminar on MalebrancheSession 1Session 2Session 3Session 4Session 5Session 6Session 7NotesIndex

I devoured this magnificent work in an evening. It blends Badiou’s usual systematic approach with a nuanced account of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophy that draws skillful contrasts between Malebranche’s system and those of Arnauld, Bossuet, Leibniz, Pascal, and the Jesuits. Hovering over the scene is the unlikely but finally compelling specter of Jacques Lacan.