Alain Badiou. Destruction, Negation, Subtraction. 2007 1/10

http://www.egs.edu/ Alain Badiou, Avital Ronnell talking about the process of negation, objectivity, creation, affirmation, subtraction and destruction as well as literature, poetry, music, Schoenberg, tonality, musical discourse, evolution, revolution, politics, and marxist ideology. Public open video lecture for the faculty and students of the European Graduate School, Media Studies Department Program, EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. Alain Badiou, born 1937, in Rabat, Morocco is a prominent French Left-wing philosopher, former chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure ENS. Alain Badiou, Ph.D: Plato and Rene Descartes Chair at EGS, born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Alain Badiou was a student at the école Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great antiphilosophers Saint-Paul, Paul the Apostle, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the centre of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues including immigration, labor, and housing. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.
He is the author of Philosophy, Le concept de modèle 1969, Théorie du sujet 1982, Peut-on penser la politique? 1985, L'Être et l'Événement 1988, Manifeste pour la philosophie 1989, Le nombre et les nombres 1990, Conditions 1992, L'Éthique 1993, 2005, Deleuze 1997, Saint Paul. La fondation de l'universalisme 1997, 2002, Abrégé de métapolitique 1998, Court traité d'ontologie provisoire 1998, Petit manuel d'inesthétique 1998, D'un désastre obscur 1998, Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2. 2006. Badiou wrote several dramas, critical or political essays including Rhapsodie pour le théâtre 1990, Beckett, l'increvable désir 1995, Le Siècle 2005; Literature and drama:Almagestes 1964, Portulans 1967, L'Écharpe rouge 1979, Ahmed le subtil 1994, Ahmed Philosophe, followed by Ahmed se fâche 1995, Les Citrouilles, a comedy 1996, Calme bloc ici-bas 1997; Théorie de la contradiction 1975, De l'idéologie, with F. Balmès 1976, Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégelienne, with L. Mossot and J. Bellassen 1977, Circonstances 1 2003, Circonstances 2 2004, Circonstances 3 2005.
Several articles and essays have been translated into English: Art as a Place for Politics Video Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 11/16, 2006, Truth Procedure in Politics Video Abreu Gallery, New York, 2006, Truth Procedure in Art Video Tilton Gallery, New York, 11/17, 2006, Jacques Lacan's Seminar On Anxiety Video The Drawing Center, New York, 2006,The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry, UCLA, Destruction, Negation, Subtraction Art Center College of Design Pasadena,The Uses of the Word Jew, The Adventure of French Philosophy, Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear On the French headscarf ban, Bodies, Languages Truths, The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution, Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic, The Desire for Philosophy and the Contemporary World, Destruction, Negation, Subtraction on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Eight Theses on the Universal, An Essential Philosophical Thesis: It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries, The Event in Deleuze, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, The Formulas of L'Etourdit, The Factory as Event Site, Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution, Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy from Metapolitics, Lacan and the Pre-Socratics, A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject, Number and Numbers, On the European Constitution, On the Truth-Process, One Divides into Two On Lenin, Philosophical Considerations of the Very Singular Custom of Voting, Philosophy as Creative Repetition, Philosophy and Politics, The Political as a Truth Procedure from Metapolitics, Politics: a Non-expressive Dialectics, The Scene of Two English translation from De l'amour, Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution, The Subject of Art Deitch Projects, New York, 1 April 2005, The Triumphant Restoration, What Happens On Beckett, What is to be Thought What is to be Done On the 2002 French elections; written by Badiou Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel, A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject, The Event in Deleuze, What is a Philosophical Institution, What is Love.

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[Xephon212]

Brilliant. I have very many EGS videos to watch-how intimidating!

[egsvideo]

thank you for the comment. there are more in the pipeline. as for "intimitating" please allow me to state that i prefer "impressive" :)

[sludgehaichoi]

i think this video would be infinitely more instructive had the camera/microphone not been places inside the windpipe of the camera-man.

[egsvideo]

Thank you for your comment. I hope you realize though, that the "windpipe" belongs to Alain Badiou himself. Does knowing that change your experience?

[NEDM1991]

Avital Ronnell is, to me, the manifestation of all that is wrong with philosophy today.

[elroquero99]

Thanks for uploading all this videos. It´s just incredible to be able to listen to all this brilliant minds giving lectures.

However, I´m a spanish-native speaker (from uruguay) and sometimes I miss a couple of words. I read that there may be transcrypts for some of the videos.Is that so? If it is, please tell me where can i find them. If there are, i´ll try to subtitle as many as I can, in order to help other people to know them. I wait for your answer. Thanks again.

[shakeyourdimsims]

i dig the ambiguity of his sporadic laugh/cough

[dreamofpauyu]

Agree!!

[negation2]

I truely am Negation, I am the sun of god

[mahyarmohaghegh]

3:20 badiou goes all out clapping alone and then stops

[soothesay]

lol

[rw75248]

How remarkable!

[Krelianx]

I'm waiting to read Logiques which i'm sure can clarify some of these 'abstract concepts'. But provisionally I have a question:

1) Why say that the affirmation made indifferently to the laws of objectivity is a part of negation? Is he using 'part' in the formal sense distinguished from 'elements', i.e it is included in the situation but it doesn't belong? This would perhaps coincide with the notion of the event qua excrescence, once it is forced into the situation as a generic subset/part.