Pocket Pantheon
Figures of Postwar Philosophy
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today’s leading political and philosophical minds. Alain Badiou draws on his encounters with this pantheon—his teachers, opponents and allies—to offer unique insights into both the authors and their work. These studies form an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An uneven and politically jaundiced collection of brief tributes to 14 deceased 20th-century French philosophers ranging from the renowned (Derrida, Foucault, Sartre) to those practically unknown outside of France (Gilles Ch telet, Fran oise Proust) by one of the primary current contenders for the title of continental philosopher-king. Offering less an introductory primer on French thought than a series of theoretical appropriations and political alignments, Badiou (Being and Event) reinforces his own ideas on the relationship between thought and political action, Being as multiplicity and, most frequently, his own Maoist commitments. With a tendency to self-mythologize through association ("Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem, Verstraeten, Terray, and yours truly") and repeated invocation of the May 1968 student revolts, the author identifies political revolutionary aspects not only in Althusser, as expected, but in the thought of Lacan and even Lyotard. Meanwhile, on the theoretical level, Derrida's notion of linguistic slippage is packaged into an account of "degrees of existence," all the more confusing for its brevity. Neither a truly illuminating introduction to French philosophy nor to Badiou's own complex thought, this book's primary value is rather as a document of Badiou's strategic positionings and prejudices.
