Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is the most influential—and controversial—contemporary French philosopher. Since the publication of his magnum opus, L’être et l’évenement (Being and Event), in 1988, Badiou has emerged as a thinker whose scope and depth equal those of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. The significance of Badiou’s thought, the editors of this new Routledge title argue, consists in breaking decisively with the legacies of post-Heideggerean phenomenology and French poststructuralism. Most controversially, they say, Badiou reaffirms the Platonic bond between philosophy and mathematics, and draws on mathematical resources to effect a rehabilitation of the universal. Although critically contested, Badiou’s reactivation of the power of the universal imbues his thought with a synoptic scope rare in academic philosophy. (Indeed, his work is informed by innovations in contemporary politics, music, drama, literature, and cinema, as well as by developments in contemporary mathematics, and this breadth of cultural references may explain why Badiou’s often difficult works appeal to non-academic readers, and why they have been translated into so many languages.) Furthermore, Badiou’s commitment to egalitarian politics is unwavering and he is a key source of inspiration for political activists not only in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Over the past several decades, many evaluations of Badiou and his work have emerged: from his encounters with Plato, St Paul, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Althusser, Lacan, and Deleuze, to his appropriation of mathematics, politics, and art. Some of this literature—widely dispersed across edited collections, journals, and other periodicals, and not all of it currently available in English translation—is characterized by painstaking engagement; some of it is highly polemical. Now, to help researchers and students distinguish the useful from the tendentious and to enable them to navigate and make better sense of this complex body of scholarship, Routledge announces Alain Badiou, a new addition to its Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers series. Edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, two leading experts, this four-volume ‘mini library’ is a carefully curated compendium of all the most significant Badiouian secondary literature.