In Praise of Philosophy

What kind of philosophy do we need for the 21st century? To answer to this question, Alain Badiou imagines a dialogue between Toceras, an earnest and engaging professor, and various interlocutors from different countries and philosophical cultures – John After from Britain, Amantha from Greece, B’adj Akil from Senegal, Xi La Pong from China and several others. Their conversation takes readers on a playful journey through the history of philosophy framed by the five great questions that have preoccupied Alain Badiou: democracy, freedom, universality, language and being. At the same time, philosophy is presented not as a system or doctrine but as movement and dialogue. The philosopher is not a solitary figure; he is inseparable from his pupils, his disciples and his adversaries. It is only at the end of the journey that he arrives at the written, stable forms of his work. So we are dealing more with a play than a treatise, more with dialogues than monologues, more with a course than a book. The obvious model is Plato’s Socrates, who, in founding philosophy as a discipline, ensured that it could be established anywhere in the world. In praise, yes, of philosophy as the public creation of a thought that, inventing itself and transporting itself anywhere, speaking to anyone about anything, invents the theatricalization of being.