Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity offers critical appraisals of two of the dominant figures of the Continental tradition of philosophy, Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel. Jim Vernon and Antonio Calcagno bring together established and emerging authors in Continental philosophy to discuss the relationship between the thinkers, creating a multifarious collection of essays by Hegelians, Badiouans, and those sympathetic to both. The text privileges neither thinker, nor any particular topic shared between them; rather, this book lays a broad and sound foundation for future scholarship on arguably two of the greatest thinkers of infinity, universality, subjectivity, and the enduring value of philosophy in the modern Western canon. Assuredly overdue, this volume will attract Hegel and Badiou scholars, as well as those interested in post-structuralism, political philosophy, cultural studies, ontology, philosophy of mathematics, and psychoanalysis.

The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May '68. With the late 1970¿s ¿triumphant restoration¿ in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou¿s more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a 'communist hypothesis'. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.

In Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity: Reading Hegel and Lacan after Badiou, Mohammad Reza Naderi elaborates on the trajectory of Alain Badiou’s philosophy by following a leading thread: the dominance of axiomatic thought and the category of mathematical infinity. According to this primary proposition, axiomatic thought is the only form of thinking adequate to the infinity of being. Using both primary and secondary literature, the author demonstrates two other major propositions: 1) The coherence of Badiou’s intellectual development from the early interventions to the publication of Being and Event, and 2) The formation of a theory Naderi calls “discipline.” By working through three dimensions of disciplinary thinking—interiority, novelty, and beginning—Naderi provides a new framework for understanding the inner structure of what Badiou calls “procedures of truths” and develops a new interpretation that ultimately reveals the inner logic of Badiou’s method.

Logics of Worlds is the sequel to Alain Badiou's masterpiece, Being and Event. Tackling the questions that had been left open by Being and Event, and answering many of his critics in the process, Badiou supplements his pioneering treatment of multiple being with a daring and complex theory of the worlds in which truths and subjects make their mark - what he calls a materialist dialectic. Drawing on his most ambitious philosophical predecessors - Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Deleuze – Badiou ends this important later work with an impassioned call to 'live for an Idea'.

For Badiou serves both as an introduction to the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and as an in-depth examination of his work. Ruda begins with a thorough and clear outline of the sometimes difficult main tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. He then traces the philosophers throughout Western thought who have influenced Badiou’s project—especially Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—and on whose work Badiou has developed his provocative philosophy. Ruda draws from Badiou’s oeuvre a series of directives with regard to renewing philosophy for the twenty-first century. For Badiou continues the interrogations of its subject and raises new materialistic and dialectical questions for the next generation of engaged philosophers.

The oeuvre of Alain Badiou has gained international success and recognition, but most of the secondary literature focuses on internal problems of Badiou's philosophy, rather than its position within a broader philosophical genealogy. This book unites philosophers from Germany, Slovenia, the UK, Australia and France, to trace the relation between elements of Badiou's philosophy and the German philosophical tradition, namely the three significant movements of German Idealism, Phenomenology, Marxism and the Frankfurt School. This is a discussion that has not yet been established, although the parallels and decisive differences between poststructuralist French philosophy and German philosophy are apparent. Through these paradigms – Badiou's reception of German Idealism, Marxism, Adorno and the Critical Theory, and Heideggerian phenomenology – the authors shed light onto Badiou's inheritance of and engagement with these specific traditions, but also highlight the links between these philosophies to open up new questions for contemporary continental thought. With an original chapter from Alain Badiou himself, looking back at his influences and antagonisms within the German tradition, this book is essential for readers interested in the exploration of Badiou's legacy. It illustrates the continuation of poststructuralist philosophy, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, assessing the place of classic continental philosophy to tackle how we might benefit from these intellectual exchanges today.

A translation of one of the single most important works of recent French philosophy, Badiou's magnum opus, and a must-have for his growing following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental thought.