Zadie Smith on NW

From a 2013 interview with the author

Zadie Smith

From Richard Godwin (London Evening Standard):

NW was her attempt to write an ‘existential novel’, to channel her reading of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre into a modern, black, female setting. ‘Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts. I wanted to have that on the page, as horrible as it might seem,’ she says.

Her father Harvey died in 2006, prompting what she describes as a long bout of reflection. ‘My family’s very noisy but my father was the quiet part of it. I miss that quietness.’ Then, in 2009, she became a mother for the first time, which informed the book’s ‘subconscious’ theme of fertility as well as its more overt concern with mortality. ‘There’s suddenly no one between you and death. My father’s dead, so there’s a direct route now. A few days ago, my three-year-old was messing around, saying, “One day I’ll be six and one day I’ll be seven and one day I’ll be 28.” I realised I would be 65. Me and Nick were like, “Oh my God.” This child is eating your life.’

However, despite its darker shades, NW’s warmth makes it a pleasure, much like an afternoon in a London park. The four central characters, Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan, are all supposed to have grown up close to where we meet: Leah does similar social work to Smith’s mother Yvonne; Natalie goes to a good university, just like Smith. ‘We always felt very fortunate,’ she says of her own upbringing. ‘Rich, lucky. It was only when I grew up that I realised we weren’t rich, but it was fine. We were on a nice estate, not much trouble. My school was nice. My friends were nice. My parents separated, but they managed it well.’

Now, Smith says she has all she could want as a writer and as a mother. She lives on campus in SoHo, where her fellow parents tend to be astrophysicists and economists. ‘My playground conversations are mind-blowing. I walk in and see the neuroscientist mum and think, “Oh, how embarrassing, I don’t know anything.” ’ Above all, she has the ‘higher headspace’ she needs, and an academic routine reminiscent of her time at Cambridge. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Wood on Teju Cole and Open City
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975
• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles

The World As Albert Camus Saw It

The Irish Times profiles Camus' political and philosophical outlook

Albert Camus reads a newspaper

From Lara Marlowe (The Irish Times):

That Camus became one of the finest writers of the 20th century and a Nobel laureate is something of a miracle. The writer was born 100 years ago, on November 7th, in a remote corner of colonial Algeria, where his father was employed as a labourer in a vineyard. When the first World War started, Lucien Camus joined a Zouave infantry regiment. He was killed weeks later, at the Battle of the Marne.

Camus’s mother, Catherine, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, was half-deaf and suffered from a speech impediment. She cleaned houses to support her two sons. The family kept the piece of shrapnel that killed Lucien in a biscuit tin in their two-room flat in Belcourt, a working-class district of Algiers. The flat had no bathroom, heat or plumbing.

His brother worked full time as an errand boy from the age of 14. The same fate would have befallen Albert if his teacher, Louis Germain, had not persuaded Camus’s grandmother to let him try for a scholarship to the lycée. Germain gave Camus two hours of private lessons daily, free of charge. In December 1957 Camus dedicated his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to his former teacher. [Read More]

Find Albert Camus on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• On Albert Camus' Algerian Chronicles
• Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles
• On Albert Camus
• Albert Camus on Dostoyevsky and Nihilism
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Camus Car Crash Conspiracy
• Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Can the Public Intellectual Save the University?

26 September 2013, 10.30am - 5.00pm

What is the current state of the univerity? Has it been reduced to a bureaucratic machine that has killed thinking?

Or is it a place where true intellectual engagement still exists?

Join us for a one-day event to discuss the role of the university today and its responsibility to the public.

10:30 - 10:45 Welcome Address (Carl Cederström)
10:45 - 11:45 Martin Parker (Alternative Business)
12:00 - 13:00 Mary Evans (Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities)
14:00 - 15:00 Andy Martin (The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs. Camus)
15:15 - 16:15 Simon Critchley (The Hamlet Doctrine)
16:15 - 17:00 Panel debate

Venue

John Pryde Lecture Theatre
Sir Martin Evans Building
Museum Avenue
Cardiff CF10 3AX [See Map]

Register

This event is free of charge and open to everyone. Click here to Register. [Read more]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

We Have Only This Life to Live: 
The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

From NYRB:

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch

A new play published by Columbia University Press

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Columbia University Press:
The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts, a new play by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with an introduction by Kenneth Reinhard.

The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou’s transition from classical Marxism to a “politics of subtraction” far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.

This bilingual edition presents L’Incident d’Antioche in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel’s The City, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer’s extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou’s intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play’s settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. [Read More]

Praise for the book

Badiou resembles Sartre in the versatility, creativity, and energy that make them major literary authors as well as philosophers. It is a measure of Spitzer's talent as a translator that she manages to preserve the literariness of Badiou's language—its difficulty, strangeness, and beauty—while making it vivid and fluid and consistent with the syntactical and grammatical demands of English.

— Joseph Litvak, Tufts University

Badiou is one of very few writers for the theater to reflect explicitly on the contemporary possibilities and limits of political theater.

— Peter Hallward, Kingston University

Between three Pauls, the apostle, Claudel, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Badiou revives the tradition of political theater. In language of unprecedented beauty, he portrays a city--both archaic and ultra-contemporary--whose prince is, or will be, a woman.

— Catherine Malabou, University of Kingston

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal: International Conference 2012

University of Antwerp · 12 - 14 December 2012

University of Antwerp

Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal
An International Conference
University of Antwerp, 12-14 December 2012
(Hof van Liere, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s saying that “Kafka’s testimony is all the more universal as it is profoundly singular” is indicative of a key paradox in the 20th century Kafka reception which has wide-reaching implications for our understanding of the interface between literature and philosophy. Kafka is indeed often regarded as the ultimate witness to the human condition in the 20th century and, like Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe in their times, is attributed a universal significance. Yet Kafka’s work is also known for expressing the irreducibly singular and unclassifiable. The various conceptions of universality and singularity that underlie these attributions as well as the different guises in which the paradox of their simultaneity appears will be explored in this three-day conference at the University of Antwerp.

Organizing Committee:
Prof. Vivian Liska; Prof. Arthur Cools, Dr. Jo Bogaerts, Dr. David Dessin

Keynote speakers:
Prof. Stanley Corngold - Princeton University
Prof. Rodolphe Gasché - University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Prof. David Suchoff - Colby College
Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté - University of Pennsylvania

Thank you to Wayne Stables for alerting me to the conference.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia
• Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist: Illustrated
• Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay

Peter Brook on Samuel Beckett's Joy

George Hunka on the problems of using biography to interpret literature

Peter Brook

In a post promoting upcoming Beckett productions in New York, George Hunka (Superfluities Redux) addresses Peter Brook's comments on the 'shining thread', even joy, that supposedly runs through Samuel Beckett's plays:

Brook engages rather dangerously with the biographical fallacy (as well as misinterprets existentialism, which certainly sought to engage with society for its improvement, to the extent that many of its founding members, including Jean-Paul Sartre, were Socialists or Marxists) — that the life, in this case Beckett’s gregariousness, contains at least one primary key to the work: “I knew Beckett, and I found him a man of enormous humanity and humor and a really good companion and friend. Nothing was more enjoyable than to be with him,” Brook says. Because Beckett’s kindness, generosity and delight in some bourgeois pleasures are well documented, both critics and audiences have found this a singular means of finding that “shining thread” as evidence of a hilarious Beckettian optimism, as if Beckett himself were only a slightly more reticent Brendan Behan.

Arthur Schopenhauer, too, loved a good wine, a fine dinner and a good play; but does this necessarily undermine the pessimistic character of either his work or Beckett’s? Because both writers surveyed the vast spectrum of human experience, there are moments of joy and happiness to be found in the work of both writers, but do they outweigh the darker conclusions to which their writing leads? It has been my experience that those of an ordinarily melancholy disposition in their work are, as people, excellent companions: often witty, quick to find a joke in the darkest conversation, and genuinely compassionate. But it has everything to do with the man, and the way in which he believes human beings should conduct themselves among others, and not the writing, which describes the ways in which human beings normally conduct themselves among others. Especially in early Beckettian prose, let alone the early drama, there’s considerable comedy: the spectacularly unfortunate Lynch family of Watt, the apparent reference to Jonathan Swift’s feckless Lemuel Gulliver in the Lemuel that concludes Malone Dies. But I must say this “shining thread” is exceedingly hard to come by in the post-1962 plays Play, Not I, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby (the climactic line “fuck life” being the shining thread of joy here, I suppose), Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe or What Where; or the post-1962 novels How It Is (especially here), Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, or Worstward Ho. These works constitute by far the majority of Beckett’s mid-career and late work; and perhaps one is reminded of film director Sandy Bates‘ frustration with an audience that is sorry that he’s stopped making movies similar to his “earlier, funnier” films. [Read More]

Hunka is responding to comments made by Brook in an interview with the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the work of both Samuel Beckett and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Cygnus Ensemble: Sounding Beckett

John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel

This October from Cambridge University Press

John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel

A promising new publication from Cambridge University Press, published this October: 'Samuel Beckett's narrative innovations are among his most important contributions to twentieth-century literature. Yet contemporary Beckett scholarship rarely considers the effect of his literary influences on the evolution of his narrative techniques, focusing instead on Beckett's philosophical implications. In this study, John Bolin challenges the utility of reading Beckett through a narrow philosophical lens, tracing new avenues for understanding Beckett's work – and by extension, the form of the modern novel – by engaging with English, French, German and Russian literature. Presenting new empirical evidence drawn from major archives in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, Bolin demonstrates Beckett's preoccupation with what he termed the 'European novel': a lineage running from Sade to Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Gide, Sartre and Celine. Through close readings of Beckett's manuscripts and novels up to and including The Unnamable, Bolin provides a new account of how Beckett's fiction grew out of his changing compositional practice.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York

Andy Martin on existentialists in America

Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Albert Camus (right)

From The Opinionator in The New York Times: 'In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Review: Beckett's Waiting for Godot / Pinter's The Caretaker

Charles McNulty on the erudition of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett

Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, with Jonathan Pryce, left, and Alan Cox. Photograph: Helen Warner / March 8, 2012

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, theatre critic Charles McNulty reviews revivals of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot:

Sometimes you can't put your finger on what you've been missing until you encounter it again. After seeing two fine revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter — "Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum and the British production of "The Caretaker" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, respectively — I suddenly realized how ravenous I was for language in the theater with poetic density and grit.

Beckett, 20th century playwriting's No. 1 game-changer, and Pinter, his most original disciple, were writers steeped in literature. Their education and training didn't come courtesy of an M.F.A. program, with its cramped curriculum divorcing the stage from the other arts. They were carving paths for themselves as wide-ranging men of letters, to use a phrase that has sadly gone the way of "bibliophile" and "public intellectual."

Of course great artists such as Beckett and Pinter are anomalous. (Nobel laureates still haven't gone into mass production.) Yet there's something to be learned from the example of two writers whose spectacular destinies can be glimpsed in their literary beginnings.

Beckett, a brilliant student of Romance languages, had a formative association with James Joyce, wrote a penetrating essay on Proust early in his career, and was as conversant with Dante as he was with the major philosophical currents of his day. Remarkably, he wound up having as profound an impact on the novel as he had on drama. (Only Chekhov, who revolutionized the short story while transforming the future of playwriting, can match this legacy among modern authors.)

Pinter, a young devourer of Dostoevski, Kafka and Joyce, was an actor and director as well as a playwright and screenwriter, but his identity as a poet preceded his dramatic work and he confined himself to poetry (and political rabble-rousing) in the last years of his life. Although Julian Sands' recent one-man tribute to Pinter at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble didn't convince me that Pinter's standing as a poet matches his standing as a playwright, the tensile strength of his dialogue, with nary an extraneous work, is inseparable from his lifelong poetic labors. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter's 'Umbrellas' Discovered
• Harold Pinter on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape

On Philosophical Novels

From Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Sartre and Bernhard

Leo Tolstoy reading, pencil portrait by Ilya Repin (1891)

Jennie Erdal writes a survey of the philosophical novel in the Financial Times, and Geoff Dyer lists five examples of memorable philosophical fiction:

At St Andrews University in the early 1970s, philosophy was still a required subject for entry into an honours course. To leave the way clear for reading modern languages, I decided that the requirement would best be dispatched in my first year. Before I knew it, I was hooked and ended up dropping one of the languages in favour of a joint degree in moral philosophy and Russian. For me it seemed the dream ticket. Russian literature was awash with existential difficulties and moral disorder, from the problem of free will in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) to the meaning of life itself in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) – not to mention all the ungovernable passions, suicide, murder and suffering humanity encountered along the way. Philosophy on the other hand, with its categorical imperatives and systematic approach to concepts of right and wrong, would provide a disciplined moral analysis. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Can Literature be Philosophical?
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

'Authenticity': Postgraduate Symposium Call for Papers

University of York · 31 May 2012

'Authenticity': Call for Papers

University of York Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Second Annual Symposium
Bowland Auditorium, Humanities Research Centre, Thursday 31 May 2012

The signs of authenticity pervade our everyday interactions with the world, from the authentic takeaway to the historical television re-enactment and the claimed impartiality of the commercial press. In response to the British riots in the summer of 2011, Tudor historian David Starkey made the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic citizenry. Those who partook in looting and affray were figured as outside authentic structures of legal and moral behaviour, ‘feral’ even. The insidious and barely concealed attribution of inauthenticity to what in London was a predominantly black community set off racial tension that for many years now has been thought of as behind us. Authenticity, then, had become the buzzword in the reenlivened discourses of politics, race, class and culture.

Through this interdisciplinary conference, the Centre for Modern Studies Post-Graduate Forum seeks to explore and question the associations and assumptions that have come to coalesce around the concept of the ‘authentic’. From the art historian Hal Foster’s charting of the ‘Return of the Real’, through its philosophical instantiations in Marx, Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Adorno, by way of the pop/mass culture debate in Cultural Studies, to the notion of performative ‘masquerade’ in theories of gender and sexuality - issues of authenticity thread through much recent work in the humanities and the social sciences. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent exhibition on postmodernism aims to historicise a discourse famous for its slippery employment of replication, reproduction and rearrangement into a compartment of the authentic academic canon.

We therefore invite abstracts for papers from post-graduates working in the humanities and social sciences disciplines in the modern period (1850-present). We would welcome interdisciplinary papers, and submissions from panels. Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• The authenticity debate in twentieth century philosophy
• Critical Counterfactualism
• Hoaxes, deceptions and counterfeiting
• Documentary film and television
• Photography
• Journalism
• Cuisine
• Digital authentication and access
• Intellectual property and copyright
• Identity: race, class, gender, sexuality
• Mimesis and verisimilitude
• Materiality / immateriality – replication, the virtual / digital (gaming)
• Fantasy / utopia / visionaries / spiritualities / sci-fi
• Costume, cross-dressing / beauty industry and cosmetics
• Geographies of authenticity – i.e. ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’ vs. ‘foreigner’ ‘alien’
• Immigration / migration

Abstracts for papers should be 300 words in length, and the deadline for submissions is Monday 26th March 2012 at 5.00pm. Please send abstracts to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk - if you would like more information about the symposium or the CMODS Postgraduate Forum, don't hesitate to contact us at this address, or visit our website.

Brian Leiter on Friedrich Nietzsche

FiveBooks Interview in The Browser

Brian Leiter of Leiter Reports answers questions about his interest in Friedrich Nietzsche: 'I had actually become interested in philosophy from reading Sartre as a high school student in French classes. The essay Rorty assigned starts on a very existentialist note – and of course the writing was very evocative. At this point I was reading it in English but Walter Kaufman’s strength as a translator is that he captures the flavour of Nietzsche in English. He’s not the most literal translator but he is the most evocative. So it was a combination of the proto-existentialist themes and the style of the writing that I found very gripping. And that sense never left me – I still always enjoying reading and re-reading Nietzsche.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Walter Kaufmann on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre
• Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche
• 'Human, All Too Human': BBC's Nietzsche Documentary
• Youthful reading: Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky
• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche

Simon Critchley's How to Read Series

Monographs on philosophy, theory, politics and religion

Brain Pickings offers a summary of Simon Critchley's series, How to Read: 'Each of the books tackles one of humanity’s great texts of literature, philosophy, science and religion, from Shakespeare to Freud to Darwin to the Bible, and enlists a leading scholar in that subject to break down the classic in a way that facilitates, deepens and enriches your understanding of it.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory

Top 11 Existentialist Novels?

Literary classics of angst, ennui and despair

Still from Orson Welles' 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial

Flavorwire lists their top 11 existentialist novels:

• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• André Gide, The Immoralist
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
• Albert Camus, The Stranger
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
• Margery Williams, The Velveteen rabbit

[Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• William Faulkner on Writers and their Work

Literary Friendships

Biographical connections between writers, poets and philosophers

Accredited Online Colleges has compiled a list of '11 Literary Friendships we can learn from', including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson [Read More]

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Badiou dissects the work of the towering twentieth century philosopher

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Verso has published Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, a new book by Alain Badiou, translated with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels.

“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!” — Slavoj Žižek

“An heir to Jean-­Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser” — New Statesman

About the book

• Alain Badiou is one of France’s most influential radical thinkers – one of the ‘last men standing’ out of the great generation who witnessed the revolution of 1968. Best known for his political philosophy, he has recently been engaged with re-orientating the radical left with his Communist Hypothesis. He has also written several plays and a novel, and various volumes of cultural criticism, the latest of which is Five Lessons on Wagner.
• Now he turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, legendary maverick thinker and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was part of Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge circle in the early 20th century and became one of the key figures of analytic philosophy and standard-bearer of the “linguistic turn”. His work was hailed by many as ‘the end of philosophy’ and indeed he referred to himself as the ‘last philosopher’.
• Wittgenstein’s great work was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written in his twenties, it had a huge impact on modern thought, and in particular the use of language and logic in analytic philosophy. Badiou dissects the Tractacus, and finds Wittgenstein to be an exemplar of antiphilosophy.
• Antiphilosophy is defined by Badiou as a way of doing philosophy which questions or attacks the very basis of philosophy itself. Other key antiphilosophers would include Nietszche, Kierkegaard and Lacan.
• Badiou addresses the crucial seventh proposition in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus where Wittgenstein argues that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a set of esoteric aphorisms.
• In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Antiphilosophy shows the philosopher what he is: a political militant, hated by the powers that be and their servants; an aesthete; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man; and a savant. It is in this effervescent rebellion that philosophers produce their ideas.
• Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project – and that a dialogue with the exemplar of antiphilosophy is crucial to the continuing development of modern thought.

Praise for Alain Badiou

Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda… Badiou has launched a transformative new intervention, which deserves to provoke a persisting response.

Terry Eagleton

Badiou is at his strongest in pointing to the inconsistencies of a facile multiculturalism, the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, which wilts in the face of any genuine expression of cultural hostility to liberal values.

Radical Philosophy

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today

Irish Left Review

Badiou is by turns speculative, provocative…and droll.

Times Literary Supplement

Walter Kaufmann on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre

Listen to the 1960 lectures over at Open Culture

In the 1960s, renowned scholar Walter Kaufmann presented a series of lectures on what he considered the key existentialist thinkers of our time. Three of Kaufmann's talks, on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre, are now listed in the philosophy section of Open Culture: 'The three lectures offer a short primer on existentialism and the modern crises philosophers grappled with. Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion begins the series, followed by Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy and Sartre and the Crisis in Morality' (link via Philosophy Bites) [Listen]

Public Intellectuals in the UK

Why doesn't the United Kingdom celebrate its intelligentsia?

French philosophers Jean Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

In an article in The Observer, John Naughton explores the phenomenon of the 'public intellectual'. Noting the popularity of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in France, Naughton wonders why a similar respect and admiration is not afforded to similar figures in the United Kingdom.

Source: John Naughton, 'Why don't we love our intellectuals?', The Observer, 8 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre

Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist was 'not a strong philosopher'

(Link via Maud Newton.)

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida