Audio: The left and the ideas of Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Wednesday February 24, 2010 12:49 by Paddy/Alessandro (recorded by Andrew) - Better Questions

This is an audio recording of a Better Question discussion if the ideas of the French left philosophers Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. A fifty minute introduction is given by Paddy Bresnihan and Alessandro Zagato followed by about forty minutes of discussion about the presentations.

Alessandro Zagato & Paddy Bresnihan

From the advertisement for the event
Despite the cynicism and melancholy of a decadent left, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou persist in imagining the possibility of an entirely different state of affairs. Central to their thought is the conviction that emancipation does not derive from objective conditions – that politics no longer has an historical homeland. It is rather the becoming of a radically new subjectivity, heterogeneous to the determinism of places and functions.

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis). He first came to prominence in 1968 when he co-authored Reading Capital with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Alain Badiou (Rabat, 1937) teaches philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays he has published a number of major philosophical works. After a long political militancy in the Maoist far left, in 1985 Badiou founded L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention.

The forty minutes of discussion after the presentation will be added here as a comment tomorrow

Slide used in Alessandro's talk