Nov
07
Lectures and Workshops

Graduate Art Seminar: Alain Badiou

Monday, November 07, 2016

7:30 pm Add to Calendar

ArtCenter South Campus
Wind Tunnel
870 S. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103
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Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is theRene Descartes Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. As the former chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault andJean-François Lyotard—Badiou is one of the most significant philosophers of our time.

While Badiou’s political position has drawn him the most attention within academia and beyond, it is his ontology that is the center of his system. Badiou’s “system” is built upon the purity of mathematics––specifically, set and category theory. The structure—of vast complexity—stands in relation to the history of contemporary French philosophy, German Idealism, and the primary works of antiquity. It is constituted out of a series of determinate negations of the history of philosophy, but also out of the histories of what Badiou terms conditions: art, politics, science, and love––the essence of his theory of compossibility.

In brief, as Alain Badiou defines it in the Introduction to Being and Event (2005), philosophy is that which “circulates between … ontology (thus, mathematics), the modern theories of the subject and its own history.” An outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts, his philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou

The Graduate Art Seminar lecture series is a forum for graduate students, members of the ArtCenter community and the general public to enter into dialog with internationally recognized artists, critics, and art historians. The Seminar is a core component of ArtCenter’s Graduate Art program. See artcentermfa.net for more information.