Alain Badiou's translation of Plato's Republic is both a work of literary transformation and, implicitly, a powerful and original comme ntary on Plato. Badiou stands virtually alone among major, modern-day philosophers as a self-proclaimed Platonist, the champion of what he calls a "Platonism of the multiple" rejecting anti-Platonism and most contemporary accounts of the thinker. For Badiou, Plato is the first philosopher precisely because he established philosophy's foundation in mathematics and its antagonistic relationship to sophistry. He is the predominant warrior in the eternal battle of philosophy against sophistry, of truth against opinion, and is the progenitor of the living idea of communism. It is also from Plato that Badiou derives his organization of truth into four fields, or sets, of "procedures:" science, politics, art, and love. Some readers may be scandalized by Badiou's liberties in this translation:his systematic modifications of Greek terms, occasional elimination of entire passages, pervasive anachronistic references (such as AIDS, IPods, and Euros), and other conspicuous transformations. His language (and Susan Spitzer's translation) is dramatically vivid, colloquial,colorful, and at times raw and gritty. Socrates and his interlocutors speak like Europeans or Americans of today or the recent past, and their cultural references are both classical and contemporary. Nevertheless, Badiou's remains faithful to the spirit of Plato's text -- and, above all, to Plato's ideas.

This book is now available for the first time in paperback, the remarkable debut of a former student of Alain Badiou. Quentin Meillassoux, a former student of Alain Badiou, is considered to be one of the most talented and exciting new voices in contemporary French philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux's remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of Continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, "After Finitude" provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. Meillassoux introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. "After Finitude" proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse. The exceptional lucidity and the centrality of argument in Meillassoux's writing should appeal to Analytic as well as Continental philosophers, while his critique of fideism will be of interest to anyone preoccupied by the relation between philosophy, theology and religion.

Logics of Worlds is the long-awaited sequel to Alain Badiou's much heralded masterpiece, Being and Event. Fifteen years after Badiou's groundbreaking work first appeared in French, the greatest and most influential contemporary French philosopher finally presents his readers with a truly remarkable follow-up, answering many of the questions posed by his critics and continuing the development of his fascinating theories of truth, subject and event.
Appearing in French for the first time in 2006, this hugely important new book is set to make a significant and controversial contribution to contemporary philosophical thought. This brand new translation will make available to an English-speaking audience for the first time a book that is essential reading for Badiou's considerable following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental philosophy.

人們多以集權恐怖、大屠殺、虛妄的前衛藝術、普及論等字眼描繪上個世紀，當代重要哲學家Alain Badiou站在世紀本身的立足點，用曼傑利什塔姆和佩索亞的詩歌、以沙特和傅科的哲學斷簡，從毛澤東的政治眼光，還有布萊希特、皮藍德婁的戲劇等面向，拼貼廿世紀的面貌。

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education. Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art. Among these "inaesthetic" variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stephane Mallarme, and Samuel Beckett.

为什么是圣保罗？为什么要诉诸这位“使徒”？他似乎更加怀疑自称为“使徒”的正确性，他的名字常常与基督教最不开放、最制度化的方面有关：教会，道德纪律，社会保守主义，对犹太人的怀疑。我们何以把这个名字纳入我的研究？我的研究旨在重建一个主体理论，把生存置于事件的机遇维度，置于多元存在的纯粹偶然性，而又不牺牲真理。

Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection. Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Ranciere's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death. Caught between consumerism and casual sexual encounters devoid of passion, love today - without the key ingredient of chance - is in mortal danger. Alain Badiou proposes a vision of love as an adventure of the individual.

Liberal and libertine reductions of love to instant pleasure and non-commitment bite the dust as Badiou invokes a supporting cast of thinkers from Plato to Lacan via Karl Marx to create a new narrative of romance, relationships and sex - one that does not fear love.

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Why bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain Badiou does, that philosophy is first and foremost a metaphysics of happiness, or else it’s not worth an hour of trouble? What possible relationship can there be between mathematics and happiness?
That is precisely the issue at stake in this dialogue, which serves as a very accessible introduction to what mathematics is and an exploration of the crucial influence it has always exerted on the greatest philosophers. Far from the thankless, pointless exercises they are often thought to be, mathematics and logic are indispensable guides to ridding ourselves of dominant opinions and making possible an access to truths, or to a human experience of the utmost value. That is why mathematics may well be the shortest path to the true life, which, when it exists, is characterized by an incomparable happiness.

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.

Two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world? Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all - as Badiou shows with his theory of universality. Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess. At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.

In Can Politics Be Thought?—published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time—Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism. Distinguishing politics as an active mode of thinking from the political as a domain of the State, Badiou argues for the continuation of Marxist politics. In so doing, he shows why we need to recapture the emancipatory hypothesis of Marx's original gesture in order to actualize its radical potential. This volume also includes Badiou's “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” in which he rebuts claims of Communism's death after the fall of the Soviet Union.