Philosophy
École Normale Supérieure, Paris

Politics, Democracy and Philosophy:
An Obscure Knot
A lecture in conjunction with the UW workshop, “Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?”

Alain Badiou is a poet, playwright, critic, screenwriter, aesthetician, and political activist; he is also among the most innovating philosophers of our time. Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, he has taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) and the École Normale Supérieure. Known for his re-thinking of core ideas in European philosophy such as event, aesthetics, love and truth, Badiou was trained as a mathematician before engaging philosophy as such. Badiou’s partition of scholarship into four fields—politics, science, art, and love—and his inventive writing on thinkers ranging from Plato, St. Paul, and Samuel Beckett to Mao Zedong, Jacques Lacan, and Heidegger offers a demonstration of philosophy’s powers and its importance. Among Badiou’s recently published works in English translation are Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), Handbook of Inaesthetics (2004), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (2005), and Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution, a special issue of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique (2005).

Hear this lecture in Windows Audio, Real Video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Click here to read an interview with Alain Badiou by Diana George and Nic Veroli.

Special thanks to Terry Schenold and the Blooded by Thought project for the audio recording of this lecture.