Talk:Alain Badiou

message: In the second sentence it is said: "Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy". Now I of course don't disagree with Badiou being anti-postmodern, but the formulation of the sentence is such that it gives one the idea that that his whole œuvre is about anti-postmodernism. Now I don't know him that well, but what I've heard is just enough to know that that isn't the case, and that is of course also not the case for Žižek and I presume that also counts for Agamben, although I know literally nothing about him. So the sentence should be changed, but I don't feel like I have the knowledge of Badiou's thought to do that without possibly making a big mistake.--Tomvasseur (talk) 22:08, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I agree with you Tomvasseur. The sentence should be changed. I've thought that misleading also, and it jumps out at me almost every time I re-read the article. That's kind of how it needs to sound in a Wikipedia style lead paragraph, but here it comes across as cursory at best. Maybe you can come up with a revision later on, and/or propose it here. And if I can come up with something, I'll bring it here. Check back in another month or so, or put "Alain Badiou" on your watchlist if you haven't done so, and you can keep track of the changes. I suspect someone else will read this and make a change soon, or state why it should "stay"Christian Roess (talk) 00:33, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor editing issues 

message: Seeing as there was still no actual writing beyond a bio, I've tried to give a brief run through of Being and Event. (Which for the record is very hard!) It's a veritable balancing act between oversimplification and overcomplexity writing this but I think it grapples with the fundamental cornerstones of the book. (Or some anyway, if I did them all it'd last forever - and I'm mainly using this to get practice writing a paper on him.)
Anyway, feel free to tweak. I've purposefully left out the parts on Evil and religion because they'd probably be better covered in a different section. I've also tweaked the bio myself, primarily because it cast him as a mainline Marxist, which he really isn't.
Cheers,
SHJ.
: Great work! VoluntarySlave 18:58, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Getting the ball rolling

message: *Politics: a Non-expressive Dialectics (PDF) is a broken link. Should it be removed? I can't find this PDF anywhere.--Paul Adams 22:20, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's working again. David Sneek 16:44, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Broken Links 

message: I hope it is useful; I only copied from the back of his last one.--Cleversnail 13:08, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: List of Badiou's books

message: The point about the slow uptake of Badiou's work (where there's a flag saying a citation is needed) is taken from Badiou's introduction to the English version of Being and Event (By Continuum, 2005), if anyone feels like adding that in.
:I find this amusing - straight from the horse's mouth, eh? Next we'll have Badiou saying he's figured out 
:Everything for sure and I suppose it's going to be published on Wikipedia. Self-advertising, anyone? 193.198.8.211 (talk) 16:44, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Citations

message: Well, I really dont know well the philosophy of badiou, but the article says that he's a maoist (school: maoism) and do not explain it (only this stpd one sentence: Another philosopher Jean-Claude Milner identified him with Maoism and has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.230.63.160 (talk) 14:57, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, the article also says Badiou was a member of the Maoism UCFML, and is currently a member of L'Organisation Politique, founded with Maoists from the UCFML; so the connection to Maoism seems pretty clear. The external links section also includes som articles in which Badiou discusses Maoism, e.g. "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?" and "An Essential Philosophical Thesis: 'It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries'". It would probably be good, though, if the article talked more about some of the specific cases in which Badiou uses his theory of the event; for instance, the discussion of the Bolshevik Revolution as an event, as well as examples of events in art and science.VoluntarySlave (talk) 17:43, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Maoist?

message: Does anyone have any further information on Badiou's adoption by revolutionary movements where he is "often read together with Frantz Fanon?" What specific organizations see him as a notable influence? I am not suggesting this is not true, I am just personally curious.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.249.220.73 (talk) 02:49, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use in Third World Radical Movements 

message: Original research is the tag at the top, just added by user Bigdaddy1981. 
I don't believe this is correct, and does not justify making major changes to the article. But nonetheless more references could be added to support some of the claims. Nothing wrong with backing up the "facts". User BigDaddy has a point.
Some minor quibbles however. Quickly set down here, so apologies for the awkward syntax.
I don't believe it was necessary to remove the line "He had a lively and constant interest in mathematics.". This is true. This is inarguably correct. Badiou's interest was there EARLY. And lively. It is STILL lively. 
So an EARLY interest. Little to doubt there, and it would be difficult not to point to Badiou's father Raymond Badiou to back this claim up. Raymond Badiou was a mathematician, a professor of mathematics at lycée Pierre de Fermat. His father was also part of the French resistance and Mayor of Toulouse. These two facts concerning Badiou's father Raymond could arguably point to the origins of what are now recognizable features or obsessions in Alain Badiou's own work: a politics of resistance (see his book Metapolitics, especially the initial chapters) and mathematics The link provided is to Raymond Badiou's Wikipedia page in French for verification. 
When Alain Badiou studied under Althusser in the 1960's, Althusser was consistently wary of Badiou's mathematical "coordinates" into the philosophical. Badiou was in Althusser's class which was the initial thrust for the book "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists" by Althusser. And of course, Badiou's first published book was "The Concept of Model" (subtitled: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics) which came directly out of a course Althusser initialized. The "course" here was a lecture series, and "The Concept of Model" was Badiou's contribution. (However, May '68 and the student revolts preempted this lecture series by the way, and Badiou was only able to give the first part of his talk "The Concept of Model". Obviously he was "on the barricades" himself and stesses the importance of "fidelity" to the "event" of May '68)
Anyhow, the interest in mathematics seems to have been there from the beginning.
But I'll try to make some changes and recommendations that Big Daddy suggests through these tags that have been added. I don't have time right now. I'll wait to see if someone else takes the initiative, or wants to discuss these issues some more on the talk page before changes are made.Christian Roess (talk) 21:54, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research in this article? OR tag? And therefore the article needs to be rewritten? 

message: *Alain Badiou: A Life in Writing, The Guardian, 18 May 2012
Good article. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:07, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Alain Badiou: A Life in Writing

message: The article states: "...a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic."  I don't know if this was stated in the book or not, but it is completely and embarrassingly wrong.  Russell's paradox says nothing about the existence or non-existence of a set containing itself; it is the Axiom of Regularity (mentioned later) that does this.  If Regularity is omitted or even denied (i.e. stated that there exist sets belonging to themselves), Russell's paradox would continue to hold.
Russell's paradox is about sets that don't belong to themselves, i.e. "ordinary" everyday sets such as the empty set, the singleton, the set of natural numbers, etc.  It states in effect that there are so many such ordinary sets that asserting the collection of all of them is also a set leads to a contradiction: if it belonged to itself, then it wouldn't belong to itself; but if it didn't belong to itself, then it would belong to itself.
In fact, Russell's paradox can be derived from pure first-order logic without any axioms of set theory at all (or in some formulations of it, a mild use of the Axiom of Extensionality, such as the version on my site).
Nmegill (talk) 14:32, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: You're quite right. I've removed the incorrect sentence. Thanks for pointing this out. VoluntarySlave (talk) 15:20, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

text: The article still says "there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic."  But still Russell's paradox did not rule this out, it remains possible in formal logic, and indeed several well known set theories has sets with themselves as elements (Aczel's AFA, any set theory with a universal set, and many versions of set theories with urelements).  ZF does preclude it, by the axiom of Regularity. Colin McLarty (talk) 18:40, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russell's paradox 

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