Being and Event [Paperback]

Alain Badiou (Author), Oliver Feltham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2007

Being and Event is the centrepiece of Alain Badiou's oeuvre; it is the work that grounds his reputation as one of France's most original philosophers. Long-awaited in translation, Being and Event makes available to an English-speaking readership Badiou's groundbreaking work on set theory - the cornerstone of his whole philosophy. This book makes the scope and aim of Badiou's whole philosophical project clear, enabling full comprehension of Badiou's significance for contemporary philosophy. In Being and Event, Badiou anchors this project by recasting the European philosophical tradition from Plato onwards, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Rousseau, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a history of philosophy rivalling those of Heidegger and Deleuze in its depth.This wide-ranging book is organised in a precise and novel manner, reflecting the philosophical rigour of Badiou's thought. Unlike many contemporary Continental philosophers, Badiou - who is also a novelist and dramatist - writes lucidly and cogently, making his work accessible and engaging. This English language edition includes a new preface, written especially for this translation. Being and Event is essential reading for Badiou's considerable following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Two things are new in this much-anticipated translation of Badiou: the language and the preface. Both are instructive. Translator Oliver Feltham stayed "as close as possible to Badiou's syntax" but "at the price of losing fluidity." The logic behind this sacrifice being that Badiou's syntax does its own philosophical work; the unfortunate result being that many sentences, though elegant in French, are wounded in English. For example, this hop-along on Marxism: "That the dialectic of its existence is not that of the one of authority to the multiple of the subject." Thankfully, Badiou addresses such dissonance and his larger philosophical goals in an indispensable new preface-without which the 37 weighty meditations might be lost to the layperson. Even with the new preface, those reading Badiou or Continental philosophy for the first time might experience something intellectually akin to running into the ocean. (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil is a slimmer, more accessible introduction to this novelist, and playwright and professor at Ecole Normale Superieure.) Otherwise it takes a miracle to understand the four theses of this work, organized as they are into a chevron consisting of Being, Event, Truth, Subject. Badiou is concerned with the potential for profound, transformative innovation in any situation. His approach is part mathematical (Candor's set theory), part rationalist (Anglo-American), part poetic (Continental) and part textual (11 legends of philosophy are confronted "on singular points"), but his ideas are intensely rarified. Recommended for specialists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Two things are new in this much-anticipated translation of Badiou: the language and the preface. Both are instructive. Translator Oliver Feltham stayed 'as close as possible to Badiou's syntax' but 'at the price of losing fluidity.' Thankfully, Badiou addresses such dissonance and his larger philosophical goals in an indispensable new preface—without which the 37 weighty meditations might be lost to the layperson. Recommended..." — Publishers Weekly

(Publishers Weekly )

"A variety of scholars, including philosophers, mathematicians, and intellectual historians, would do well to examine this volume and seek in it threads that warrant continued examination in an era of nanotechnology and political terrorism."- Francisca Goldsmith, Library Journal, April 1, 2006

(Library Journal )

"Badiou's approach is unique, rigorous, and interesting..." - Jill Stauffer, Theory & Event

"[Badiou] develops, in the central passages of the book, his central notions of situations and events, and devotes many, often arresting pages to elucidating the mechanism by which the latter productively disrupt the former. The structure of experience is not merely open to change, pregnant with contingent revolution. This is a nice model and Badiou deploys it across a broad front." - Hugh Lawson-Tancred for The Liberal

“Two things are new in this much-anticipated translation of Badiou: the language and the preface. Both are instructive. Translator Oliver Feltham stayed 'as close as possible to Badiou’s syntax’ but 'at the price of losing fluidity.’ Thankfully, Badiou addresses such dissonance and his larger philosophical goals in an indispensable new preface—without which the 37 weighty meditations might be lost to the layperson. Recommended…” – Publishers Weekly

(Publishers Weekly )

"Badiou’s approach is unique, rigorous, and interesting…" - Jill Stauffer, Theory & Event

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (July 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082649529X
• ISBN-13: 978-0826495297
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

173 of 185 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A watershed in the history of philosophy, February 8, 2006

By 

MK (Colorado Springs, CO United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Being and Event (Hardcover)

I had been hoping for some time that someone would write a review for this long-awaited translation. Unfortunately none has appeared and until a more comprehensive and useful review is written, I hope these brief comments will help.

(A brief disclaimer. This review does not summarize or critique the arguments in this book--it would be unjust to attempt to do so in the space of a few paragraphs. I hope only to give some indication of the relevance of this work for those who are interested in Badiou's work and/or those who have heard the name "Badiou" and are trying to find a way in to what his work is all about. If my comments are elliptic or obscure because I use Badiou's terms without providing explication, this is only because I hope that I give enough indication of the direction of his ideas to promote the reading of the actual text.)

Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the quality of the translation, since I have not seen the French text. Feltham's familiarity with Badiou's work is unquestionable, however. He was, for example, one of the editors of the collection "Infinite Thought" (also published by Continuum). He has also contributed to a recent issue of `Polygraph' devoted to a discussion of Badiou's work (#17, 2005).

Until this translation, American readers were denied significant access to Badiou's philosophical method and concepts. The key sources were commentaries by people like Peter Hallward, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Eric Alliez (and, of course, Slavoj Zizek). The closest one got to Badiou himself was the collection called "Theoretical Writings" (also published by Continuum). With the exception of "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being", it was difficult to know what Badiou's work was all about since just about all of his other translated works presuppose knowledge of the concepts and terms developed in "Being and Event".

Those who have read Badiou's "Deleuze" will have some idea of what occupies "Being and Event". The title recalls, of course, Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Badiou explicitly agrees with Heidegger that philosophy can only be done on the basis of the ontological question. In "Deleuze", Badiou argues that that great thinker was at bottom a thinker of the One and, as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, the real quarrel between Badiou and Deleuze is over who can speak of being as pure multiplicity. For Deleuze, the concepts are those found in Bergson and the differential calculus; for Badiou one must look to post-Cantorian set theory. In both cases, one cannot approach ontology without a firm understanding of mathematics (anyone who does not have a working grasp of set theory will not be prepared for "Being and Event").

The ontological question cuts a diagonal through various trajectories. Although Badiou accepts the gauntlet Heidegger threw down to philosophy, like Deleuze he thinks that ontology has to be done post-phenomenologically. Badiou even rejects the later Heidegger's notion of "forgetting". Badiou's answer to the ontological question involves a second project in "Being and Event": the articulation of a post-Cartesian (and even a post-Lacanian) subject. If, Badiou says, mathematics is ontology (that is, only mathematics can write being as it is, even if there is no intra-mathematical sense to this writing), the question is no longer the Kantian "how is mathematics possible?" but, rather, if mathematics is the science of being, how is a *subject* possible? In accord with his notion that there are four (and only four) "truth procedures", there are only artistic, scientific, political, and amorous subjects. It is on this idea that Badiou's other works on ethics, politics, art ("inaesthetic"), and so forth, are predicated. In a sense, none of Badiou's other translated works make much sense without the doctrine of the subject laid out in "Being and Event".

(This project of a post-Cartesian subject is announced by the book itself in that it is written as a series of "meditations" that could not be more dissimilar in method to the meditations of either Descartes or Husserl. My own hunch is that any successful engagement and/or refutation of Badiou's work will have to be done on the question of method--viz., Badiou's axiomatic procedure.)

These theses on ontology and subjectivity cross the so-called analytic-continential divide in philosophy. Badiou offers readings of major thinkers throughout the history of philosophy and his readers are asked to have a similarly encyclopedic knowledge of both the post-Kantian analytic and continental traditions. This book is most certainly neither for laypersons, amateurs, or beginning students of philosophy. Throughout the introduction Badiou expresses consternation over the fact that his readers must not only be professional philosophers, but also well-trained in mathematics. One is usually well-trained in one or the other. Analytic philosophy tends to do better at this than Continental (indeed, one of Badiou's goals is to provide a way out of the aporias of the Vienna Circle), but Badiou equally draws from the continental tradition (by way of figures like Hegel, Heidegger, and Lacan) and continental readings of the history of philosophy. (And, until "Being and Event", one couldn't really find much after Quine on the philosophy of set theory except something like Mary Tiles' work from 1989.)

The ontological argument, premised on what Badiou has to say about the One and the presentation of multiplicity (i.e., the question that preoccupied the presocratics) hinges on this: "maintain the position that nothing is delivered by the law of the Ideas, but make this nothing be through the assumption of a proper name. In other words: verify, via the excedentary choice of a proper name, the unpresentable alone as existent; on its basis the Ideas will subsequently cause all admissible forms of presentation to proceed. ... It is because the one is not that the void is unique ... [which is equivalent] to saying that its mark is a proper name". This is how Badiou interprets the axiom of the null (or void) set and distills the question of the One and Many from Being and change (see, e.g., the history and development of the concepts of the calculus). The question is not simply "how does one think non-being?" but also (and Parmenides also recognized this) "how does one name non-being?" The proper name, as Badiou points out in a passage immediately following the above, is not the transcendent God or the promise of the One or presence but the "un-presentation and the un-being of the one" (cf. Derrida's comments on the possibility of a negative theology).

The payoff for working through Badiou's text is nothing less than a revitalization of philosophy (particularly for anyone who thinks philosophy in America has been boring since the waning of Rortyian pragmatism). The ontological debates surrounding Deleuze/Badiou have tended to be conducted in the margins of philosophical discourse in the US (with both thinkers more popular in circles of theory than philosophy and in the pages of journals on culture and politics than Nous or Mind), but the publication of "Being and Event" itself is precisely what Badiou means when he writes of an "event": something that disrupts the current situation. ("Event" and "situation" are, of course, technical terms for Badiou. The most succinct statement of these terms is probably "The Event as Trans-Being" in the Theoretical Writings.) Like his compatriot Ranciere (who too found his own voice after breaking with a youthful Marxism), Badiou is concerned with how it is possible that something new can be seen. "Being and Event" is compulsory for anyone who thinks ontology has been boring since Heidegger (even Millan-Puelles' ambitious "Theory of the Pure Object" fails to satisfy); and for those who weren't convinced by Deleuze that alternative ways to do ontology (viz. Bergson) were dead-ends, "Being and Event" the place to turn. (Whether one ultimately agrees with Deleuze or Badiou, however, is an open question. The basic difference is this: for Badiou, multiplicities are rigorously determined; Deleuze, obviously, denies this. In both cases being is pure multiplicity, nondenumerable, etc)

And for those who may be interested by Deleuze but are wedded to more traditionally analytic ways of writing: Badiou's writing is often praised for its clarity and in many ways it mimes the economy of analytic philosophy, avoiding the obscurity (while preserving the density) of many of his French contemporaries. Badiou has often been compared to Sartre (both being novelists and playwrights in addition to philosophers), but not only does Badiou in many ways stand apart from the French traditions of Sartre and Hyppolite, "Being and Event" is eminently more readable than "Being and Nothingness". Even if Badiou's writing lacks the brilliance of Derrida or Deleuze, this may be because he explicitly tells us that the poetic is subordinate; indeed, Badiou's writing itself is probably best described as "mathematical". While he is not immune to some amount of obscurity in some others of his writings, "Being and Event" certainly cannot be so faulted. At worst one might fault the author for demanding too much of his reader; but if this be a fault it is an admirable one to have, since it is a rare author indeed who can make such a demand.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new epoch in philosophy, June 6, 2009

By 

Christopher Kingman "Philosopher / Revolutionary" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Being and Event (Paperback)

Let us imagine the plight of a naive reader who comes to us (because we, for the sake of argument, are people who appear to "know something of philosophy") and says, "I am interested in reading some philosophy because I know philosophers are people who try to grapple with the things of the world in thought, and it seems useful to be acquainted with that sort of thing, but I find it just so difficult! Philosophers are always referring in cryptic ways to other philosophers and using specialized language and I am never sure that they are even discussing things that are relevant to my life at all! It makes my head spin! For example, I hear that to understand Hegel, one must first understand Kant, and to understand Kant one should be acquainted with Hume, which necessitates a knowledge of Descartes, and to know what any of them are talking about requires familiarity with Plato and Aristotle! I don't have the time or the discipline to study the entire history of philosophy, and I can't read everything all at once, so what do I do?"

We could perhaps be helpful by responding thus, "I understand what you mean! Becoming acquainted with a philosophical vocabulary is a time consuming and often thankless process. Nonetheless, it is helpful to realize that philosophical thought is always grappling with the world in a particular context and from a certain historical juncture. It is usually easier to read and understand things that are closer to our own context, more in tune with our own zeitgeist, if you will. Therefore I recommend that you find the one serious philosophical treatise that is most contemporaneous and work your way through it as a starting point. Not only will such a procedure more likely convince you of philosophy's applicability and relevance to contemporary life, but it will also show you what remains useful and relevant in the philosophical tradition, which remains available should you want to pursue it further."

Being and Event is the major philosophical treatise of our time. If Heidegger was the philosopher of the twentieth century (and Hegel of the nineteenth, Kant of the eighteenth, and so forth) then Alain Badiou is the philosopher for the early twenty-first century, and Being and Event his magnum opus, the foundation of his philosophical system. Any exploration of Badiou's thought (which is to say, that which philosophy has to offer for the twenty-first century) should begin with this book, which works out in systematic terms Badiou's fundamental ontology (hint: it's mathematics), and offers a retrieve and reinterpretation of the previous philosophical tradition as ambitious as Heidegger's.

Everyone even vaguely interested in contemporary philosophy owes it to themselves to get acquainted with this book, even though it may be a little difficult, especially if your grasp of mathematics is weak (though anybody who made it through geometry and advanced algebra in high school should be just fine). It is a work that requires a little persistence and patience, though such efforts will be more than amply rewarded in the end.

Or as Slavoj Zizek (one who, if anything else, could at least be said to be someone who knows something of philosophy) has said: "Read [Badiou] with the proper tremor, aware that you are reading a classic, that a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!"

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Question about the binding, February 12, 2011

By 

Jake F - See all my reviews

This review is from: Being and Event (Paperback)

This isn't a review of the book's content, but rather one of the book itself: I'm particularly irritated by the manner in which the paperback text was bound. Although I'm reluctant to actually go ahead and do so to see, I don't think it's possible to fully read each page all the way to the margin without breaking the spine of the text. Was Continuum just trying to save money on paper by condensing the margins, or what? Particularly as one nears the middle of the book, it becomes exceedingly difficult to read the entirety of the verso sheet.

Quite frustrating. Not to suggest that Verso's publications are any better, nor any less expensive for the poor quality - the publishing market for leftist theory seems to have a major form / content problem going on.