Alain Badiou is perhaps the world’s most significant living philosopher. In his annual seminars on major topics and pivotal figures, Badiou developed vital aspects of his thinking on a range of subjects that he would go on to explore in his influential works. In this seminar, Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz.
The seminar is at once a record of Badiou’s thought at a key moment in the years before the publication of his most important work, Being and Event, and a lively interrogation of Malebranche’s key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace. Badiou develops a rigorous yet novel analysis of Malebranche’s theory of grace, retracing his claims regarding the nature of creation and the relation between God and world and between God and Jesus. Through Malebranche, Badiou develops a radical concept of truth and the subject. This book renders a seemingly obscure post-Cartesian philosopher fascinating and alive, restoring him to the philosophical canon. It occupies a pivotal place in Badiou’s reflections on the nature of being that demonstrates the crucial role of theology in his thinking.
Mục lục
Editors’ Introduction to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain Badiou
Author’s General Preface to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain Badiou
Introduction to the Seminar on Malebranche: Malebranche’s “Political Ontology”
(Jason E. Smith)
About the 1986 Seminar on Malebranche
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5
Session 6
Session 7
Notes
Index
Giới thiệu về tác giả
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 Art Center 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.