Badiou, Poem and Subject - by Tom Betteridge (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Reinterpreting Badiou's philosophy in light of both his persistent, reverent invocations of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, and his long-term engagement with Samuel Beckett, Badiou, Poem and Subject fundamentally reassesses Badiou's radical departure from the legacy of Martin Heidegger, and his wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. For Badiou, both writers, from the terminus of Literary Modernism, affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation: Celan's collective and ephemeral subject of 'anabasis', and Beckett's disjunctive 'Two' of love.
Blending close textual analyses with critical reflections on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, among others, Tom Betteridgeargues that Badiou's innovative readings of both Celan's poetry and the 'latent poem' in Beckett's late prose are crucial to understanding his significance in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy and its German heritage, offering a significant contribution to a growing field of interest in Badiou's philosophical encounter with poetry, and its political ramifications.

Review Quotes

In this book, Tom Betteridge takes up a set of questions central to the work of Alain Badiou - what is a poem? what does poetry do? what is the relation between philosophy and poetry? -- in order to give the most detailed, attentive and productive account to date.
Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Tom Betteridge's reading of Badiou's two key modern literary-philosophical triangulations - with Heidegger and Celan, and with Beckett and Adorno - brings new insight to Badiou's philosophy and his insistence that philosophy resist the temptation to suture itself to its poetic condition. Betteridge's explication of the philosophical and poetic texts and issues involved is strong, clear, and nuanced.
Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA, USA

About the Author

Tom Betteridge is a London-based independent researcher and poet, UK. He completed his PhD at the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, UK.