Prominent philosopher to speak at University of Auckland

Prominent philosopher to speak at University of Auckland

Professor Alain Badiou, one of the world’s most prominent and original living philosophers, will deliver a public lecture at the University of Auckland next week.

Professor Badiou is a guest of the School of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts, as well as the Auckland Critical Theory Collective and the Europe Institute.

He will deliver his lecture, “À la recherche du réel perdu: In search of the lost real”, next Tuesday 25th November.

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Badiou holds the René Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. He was a student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the 1950s, and taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the Philosophy department.

Trained as a mathematician, Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thought. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Badiou is a lifelong militant who remains active with L’Organisation Politique, a post-party organisation concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of concrete issues including immigration, labour and housing.

He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great ‘antiphilosophers’ (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. He is credited with a contemporary renaissance in the idea of communism, and with radical innovations in ontology, mathematics, metaphysics and the relationship between truth and thought.

He is the author of several novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works. His most recent book The Age of the Poets has just been published.

Professor Badiou’s lecture is on Tuesday 25 November, 6pm at the Fisher & Paykel Appliances Auditorium, Owen G Glenn Building, 12 Grafton Road.

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