Better Questions Seminar Series: Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou

dublin | education | event notice Friday February 12, 2010 11:57 by Mick - Better Questions mickbyrne at gmail dot com

Wed, 17th of February, 6.30pm Seomra Spraoi

Better Questions presents the third in its four part seminar series, in which Paddy Bresnihan and Alessandro Zagato discuss the insights of Badiou and Ranciere

Wednesday 17th of February, 6.30pm: Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou

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.