The One: Descartes, Plato, Kant

by Alain Badiou, Jacques Lezra (Translator), Susan Spitzer (Translator), Kenneth Reinhard (Introduction)

Overview

Alain Badiou’s 1983–1984 lecture series on “the One” is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no “One”: there is no fundamental unit of being; being is inherently multiple.

What is novel in Badiou’s view of multiplicity is his reliance on mathematics, and set theory in particular. A set is a collection of things—yet, as he observes, it often is taken to “count as one” operationally for the purposes of mathematical transformations. In this seminar, distinguishing between “the One” and “counting as one” emerges as essential to Badiou’s ontological project. His analysis of reflections on oneness in Descartes, Plato, and Kant prefigures core arguments of his defining work, Being and Event.

Showcasing the seeds of Badiou’s key ideas and later thought, The One features singular readings, breathtaking theorizations, and frequently astonishing offhand remarks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231194129
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	07/04/2023
Series:	The Seminars of Alain Badiou
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	529,090
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alain Badiou is emeritus professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His seminars published by Columbia University Press include Lacan (2018), Malebranche (2019), and Images of the Present Time (2023).

Jacques Lezra is professor and chair of Hispanic studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Susan Spitzer is a frequent translator of Badiou’s works.

Kenneth Reinhard is research professor of comparative literature and English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Editors’ Introduction to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain Badiou
Author’s General Preface to the English Edition of the Seminars of Alain Badiou
Introduction to Alain Badiou’s seminar The One (1983–1984) (Kenneth Reinhard)
About the 1983–1984 Seminar
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5
Session 6
Session 7
Session 8
Session 9
Session 10
Session 11
Session 12
Session 13
Session 14
Session 15
Session 16
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Alain Badiou’s seminars are essential to understanding the evolution of his thought. This much-awaited collection of Badiou’s teachings enables the English-speaking world to experience the ‘true heart’ of his philosophy.

Sigi Jöttkandt

Badiou’s seminar is a space of conceptual experimentation and system creation, bringing together rigorous critique of contemporary ideology with innovative returns to major figures from the history of philosophy. This book, which also provides incisive introductory material, demonstrates the power of Badiou’s method. His readings of Descartes, Plato, and Kant not only are genuinely inventive, they also attest to the creation of one of the most significant philosophical endeavors of our era, Badiou’s own.

Frank Ruda

In this daring and challenging work, Badiou, one of the most fascinating and intellectually provocative thinkers of our time, provides a remarkable examination of the impasses of the metaphysics of the One in Descartes, Plato, and Kant. Badiou adapts their grappling with the equivalence of being and one to his own project of thinking the proper object of philosophy: the triad of events, truths, and subjects setting out from the idea that being is detached from the One. Knitting together mathematics and philosophy, Badiou makes a compelling demand for what he calls The Critique of Evental Reason.

Jelica Šumič Riha

The publication of Alain Badiou’s seminar The One is a major event for the philosopher of the event. When reading it, one has a sense of thinking alongside a great thinker as he formulates one of his central ideas—the distinction between the One and the count-as-one. Come to this seminar for Badiou’s most in-depth analysis of how the One functions and leave with the incredible bonus of magisterial interpretations of Descartes, Plato, and Kant. This is Badiou at his very best and at his most accessible. The perfect introduction to his foundational work Being and Event.

Todd McGowan