SUNY series, Intersections : philosophy and critical theory

"This book continues Alain Badiou's project to posit an integral link between mathematics and ontology. Originally published as part of a trilogy in 1998, Briefings on Existence engages the ideas of Deleuze, Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant and outlines how the philosophical inquiry into Being and existence converges with the possible world topology of category theory. Set against the background of a multiplication of gods that can be declared dead (the gods of religions, metaphysics, and poetry), Badiou argues that the extension of these events has fallen short of accomplishing its collective promise, but can be achieved through the mathematical understanding of ontology. After several remarkable decades of theoretical invention, French philosophy stands at a crossroads, and Badiou's egalitarian materialism is one of its strongest calls forward"--Jacket.

One of the most provocatively innovative thinkers writing in French today, Alain Badiou constantly unsettles his reader by not only absorbing but also reversing and displacing the major motifs of modernist 'antiphilosophy' from Nietzsche through Derrida. In the limpid, programmatic texts presented in readable translations here, Badiou sketches his project -- spelled out in his magnum opus, LʹEtre et lʹévénement -- to reestablish systematic philosophy as a 'Platonism of the multiple, ' articulated around the four conditioning discourses of science (notably the mathematics of set theory), politics (in a post-Marxist mode informed by the events of May '68), art (especially poetry from Holderlin to Celan), and love (as conceptualized by Lacan). The most significant challenge to 'antiphilosophy' in a long time, Badiouʹs thought promises either to displace its currently dominant forms or to deepen and refine their self-understanding. It is, in short, a force worth reckoning with.-- Publisher review.