Badiou

Summary

Dominique Pagani refers to Alain Badiou as a fellow student from the École normale and regards him as a "true philosopher" with whom one must engage, even though he is a Maoist1. He praises his Five Lessons on Wagner, which he considers the most intelligent book on Wagner. He links this achievement to the legacy of a bourgeois mother who took him to Bayreuth at fifteen23. He also takes up his reading of the end of Parsifal as a rescue through gentleness. On the theoretical level, he sums up Being and Event: a non-subject, caught in signifying chains, awaits the event. In his view, Badiou deems Marxism uninhabitable and keeps only fidelity to the event4. He criticizes him for reducing ontology to mathematics and for translating the Platonic agathon as the true rather than the good, which he calls a major misreading of Plato5. He notes several times that Badiou has never disowned the Maoism that supported the Khmer Rouge6.

1. 1M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (part 2)10 Sept 2019 · 1:58:12
2. 2The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 1:41:59
3. 3#9.13 How can sciences of history be real?29 Jan 2021 · 5:03
4. 4Preface to Simon Verdun's master's dissertation, “The critique of neo-Kantianism in Michel Clouscard”5 Jul 2018 · 16:43
5. 5The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction5 May 2026 · 48:43
6. 6#11 Ukraine: mathematics unites men, politics divides them (Aristotle)24 Mar 2022 · 1:38:22

Summary produced automatically from 16 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.