Malebranche

Alain Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou’s thought at a key moment and a lively interrogation of Malebranche’s key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace.

Badiou Alain :

Alain Badiou (PhD, Philosophy, Ecole Normale Superieure) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School; he also teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, including his masterwork, Being and Event (Continuum, 2007), and several Columbia titles, includng Plato's Republic (2013) and Jacques Lacan Past and Present (2016).Alain Badiou is emeritus professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His Columbia University Press books include Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters (2015) and Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (2018).

Jason E. Smith is chair of the Graduate Art department at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. He has written widely on contemporary philosophy and translated Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue (Columbia, 2014). He is currently writing a book on automation and work.

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

Graham Harman, author of Object-Oriented Ontology A New Theory of Everything:
I devoured this magnificent work in an evening. It blends Badiou’s usual systematic approach with a nuanced account of seventeenth and early eighteenth century philosophy that draws skillful contrasts between Malebranche’s system and those of Arnauld, Bossuet, Leibniz, Pascal, and the Jesuits. Hovering over the scene is the unlikely but finally compelling specter of Jacques Lacan.

Todd McGowan, author of Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution:
This book tackles Malebranche through Alain Badiou’s unique perspective. Badiou nicely translates questions of theology into questions of politics, bringing Malebranche a contemporary resonance that he doesn’t have in any other account.