Conditions by Alain Badiou
Book presentation by the translator Steven Corcoran and Elad Lapidot
Badiou is one of France’s leading contemporary philosophers and lectures widely in Europe and the United States. In his seminal work Being and Event (1988), he argues for the thesis that philosophy has four truth conditions, i.e. four domains in which a 'truth-event' may transpire—science, politics, love and art. The onus is on philosophy to strive to remain contemporary with the key advances in these domains of rationality by translating them into its own specific conceptual operations. Conditions, first published in French in 1992, is Badiou’s first attempt to elaborate upon philosophy’s relations to the truth-events conditioning it. The first essays begin with a gesture of clearing, in which Badiou argues against the contemporary trend to practice philosophy as a deconstruction of its own (metaphysical) history and the empty wait for its (post-metaphysical?) future. Philosophy, if it is to remain contemporary, must break with all historicism and establish itself in the absence of any reference to its history. The essays that follow go on to deal with some key events in each of the four domains of art (especially poetry since Mallarmé and Rimbaud), science (especially mathematics since the advent of set theory), emancipatory politics (especially in its post 68 manifestations), and love (Lacanian psychoanalysis as discourse on love). To round off the collection, Badiou advances a series on propositions on what he calls the writing of the generic and the exemplary case of Samuel Beckett.
