Table of Contents

The Subtractive: Preface by Francois Wahl Acknowledgements I. Philosophy Itself 1. The (re)turn of philosophy itself 2. Definition of philosophy 3. What is a philosophical institution? II. Philosophy and Poetry 4. The philosophical recourse to the poem 5. Mallarmé's method: subtraction and isolation 6. Rimbaud's method: interruption III. Philosophy and Mathematics 7. Philosophy and mathematics 8. Conference on subtraction 9. Truth: forcing and unnameable IV. Philosophy and Politics 10. Philosophy and politics V. Philosophy and Love 11. What is love? VI. Philosophy and Psychoanalysis 12. Philosophy and psychoanalysis 13. Subject and infinite 14. Antiphilosophy: Lacan and Plato VII. Writing of the Generic 15. Writing of the generic: Samuel Beckett Notes Index

Promotional Information

This is the first complete English translation of the work that immediately followed Badiou's magnum opus, Being and Event in which Badiou provides an overview of what he sees as the four great conditions of philosophy - this book is therefore central to an understanding of Badiou's whole philosophical project.

About the Author

Alain Badiou is a world-renowned French philosopher, formerly chair of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has authored multiple major works of philosophy, many of which have been published in English by Bloomsbury, including Being and Event (2005), Logics of Worlds (2009), and The Immanence of Truths (forthcoming, 2021). Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.

Reviews

"Conditions is the essential complement to Being and Event: a fascinating introduction to both its problematics and also their masterly depth." - Quentin Meillassoux

"Badiou is a prominent and sometimes controversial voice in Continental philosophy, and this collection of essays demonstrates his highly technical and original thought. Recommended for academic libraries." -Scott Duimstra, Library Journal, January 2009

"Conditions is Badiou's most important collection of essays, and publication of this comprehensive translation is long overdue. In addition to fundamental meditations on the status of general categories like philosophy and truth, the essays collected here include some of Badiou's most significant and incisive engagements with the specific "conditions" of his own philosophical orientation, in the fields of literature, mathematics, politics and love." - Peter Hallward, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, UK

"Conditions ... remains Alain Badiou's magnum opus and the most exhaustive exposition of his philosophical system, Being and Event ... [His] stark and crystalline expression of the break philosophy must make with its own self-mourning is a clear and still relevant definition of what it means to think in the twenty-first century." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

In a captivating sequence of chapters, written in a fluent style from which a rigorous philosophical meta-language is never absent and is often mingled with a poetic sense of words and expressions, Badiou's Conditions develops a systematic quest for the central issue of philosophy's place and purpose.
*The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 3*