For over a century, Richard Wagner s music has been the subject of intensedebate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological some say racist and reactionary underpinnings. In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers adetailed reading of the critical responses to the composer s work, whichinclude Adorno s writings on the composer and Wagner s recuperationby Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labartheand others. Slavoj i ek provides an afterword, and both philosophersmake a passionate case for...

In this incisive, acerbic work, Alain Badiou looks beyond the petty vulgarity of the French president to decipher the true significance of what he represents--a reactionary tradition that goes back more than a hundred years. To escape the malaise that has enveloped the Left since Sarkozy's election, Badiou casts aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy and maps out a communist hypothesis that lays the basis for an emancipatory politics of the twenty-first century.

"Polemics" is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution. At once witty and profound, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the...

The author takes on contemporary 'dating agency' conceptions of love that come complete with zero-risk insurance. He develops a new take on love that sees it as an adventure, and an opportunity for re-invention, in a constant exploration of otherness and difference that leads the individual out of an obsession with identity and self.

In Praise of Theatre is Alain Badiou's latest work on the 'most complete of the arts, ' the theatrical stage. This book, certain to be of great interest to scholars and theatre practitioners alike, elaborates the theory of the theatre developed by Badiou in works such as Rhapsody for the Theatre and the 'Theses on Theatre' and enquires into the status of a theatre that would be adequate to our 'contemporary, market-oriented chaos.'

In a departure from his usual emphasis upon canonical figures of the stage such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Badiou devotes In Praise...

In Praise of Theatre is Alain Badiou's latest work on the 'most complete of the arts, ' the theatrical stage. This book, certain to be of great interest to scholars and theatre practitioners alike, elaborates the theory of the theatre developed by Badiou in works such as Rhapsody for the Theatre and the 'Theses on Theatre' and enquires into the status of a theatre that would be adequate to our 'contemporary, market-oriented chaos.'

In a departure from his usual emphasis upon canonical figures of the stage such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Badiou devotes In Praise...

The Red Years (Les Annees Rouges) features three key texts by renowned and controversial contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou: Theory of Contradiction, Of Ideology, and The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic. Hitherto unavailable in English, these three texts elucidate the formative role of Badiou's Maoist 'phase' - an essential moment in his political and philosophical trajectory. Furthermore, these texts are vital to any understanding of radical French thought and politics in the 1970s, and in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Years also features original essays...