KENNETH REINHARD, SUSAN SPITZER, AND JASON E. SMITH
With the publication in English of Alain Badiou’s seminars, we believe that a new phase of his reception in the Anglophone world will open up, one that bridges the often formidable gap between the two main forms in which his published work has so far appeared. On the one hand, there is the tetralogy of his difficult and lengthy major works of systematic philosophy, beginning with a sort of prelude, Theory of the Subject, and continuing with the three parts of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and the recently published L’Immanence des vérités (The Immanence of Truths). On the other hand, there are his numerous shorter and occasional pieces on topics such as ethics, contemporary politics, film, literature, and art. Badiou’s “big books” are often built on rather daunting mathematical ideas and formulations: Being and Event relies primarily on set theory and the innovations introduced by Paul Cohen; Logics of Worlds adds category, topos, and sheaf theory; and L’Immanence des vérités expands into the mathematics of large cardinals. Each of these great works is written in its own distinctive, and often rather dense, style: Theory of the Subject echoes the dramatic tone and form of a Lacanian seminar; Being and Event presents a fundamental ontology in the form of a series of Cartesian “meditations”; Logics of Worlds is organized in formal theories and “Greater Logics,” and expressed in richly developed concrete examples, phenomenological descriptions, and scholia; and for reading L’Immanence des vérités, Badiou suggests two distinct paths: one short and “absolutely necessary,” the other long and “more elaborate or illustrative, more free-ranging.” Because of the difficulty of these longer books, and their highly compact formulations, Badiou’s shorter writings—such as the books on ethics and Saint Paul—often serve as a reader’s first point of entry into his ideas. But this less steep path of induction brings its own problems, insofar as these more topical and occasional works often take for granted their relationship to the fundamental architecture of Badiou’s thinking and thus may appear to have a greater (or smaller) role in it than they actually do. Hence the publication of Badiou’s seminars from 1983 through 2016 makes available a middle path, one in which the major lines of Badiou’s thinking—as well as its many extraordinary detours—are displayed with the remarkable clarity and the generous explications and exemplifications that always characterize his oral presentations.1 It is extraordinarily exciting to see the genesis of Badiou’s ideas in the experimental and performative context of his seminars, and there is a great deal in the seminars that doesn’t appear at all in his existing published writings.
The first volume of the seminars to be published in English, on Lacan, constitutes part of a four-year sequence on “anti-philosophy” that also includes volumes on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Saint Paul. The second volume, on Malebranche, is part of a similar cluster on being, which also involves years dedicated to Parmenides and Heidegger. And the later volumes, beginning in 1996, gather material from multiple years of the seminars, as in the case of Axiomatic Theory of the Subject (which is based on the sessions from the years 1996–97 and 1997–98), and Images of the Present Time (which was delivered in sessions over three years, from 2001 to 2004).
Isabelle Vodoz and Véronique Pineau are establishing the French text of the seminar on the basis of audio recordings and notes, with the intention of remaining as close as possible to Badiou’s delivery while eliminating unnecessary repetitions and other minor artifacts. In reviewing and approving the texts of the seminars (sometimes as long as thirty years after having delivered them), Badiou decided not to revise or reformulate them, but to let them speak for themselves, without the benefit of self-critical hindsight. Given this decision, it is remarkable to see how consistent his thinking has been over the years. Moreover, each volume of the seminars includes a preface by Badiou that offers an extremely valuable account of the political and intellectual context of the seminars, as well as a sort of retrospective reflection on the process of his thought’s emergence. In our translations of the seminars into English, we have tried to preserve the oral quality of the French edition in order to give the reader the impression of listening to the original recordings. We hope that the publication of Badiou’s seminars will allow more readers to encounter the full scope of his ideas, and will allow those readers who are already familiar with his work to discover a new sense of its depths, its range, and its implications—perhaps almost as if reading Badiou for the first time.