Plato famously banishes the poets from his ideal city in book X of his Republic. Yet in this banishment Plato establishes the boundaries of reason, art and poetry — boundaries that have haunted western thinkers since antiquity. In this article I will explore those Platonic boundaries, specifically the intellectual limits of poetic writing as reflected upon by self-identified Platonist Alain Badiou. That being said, I am not attempting, strictly speaking, to look at Badiou’s interpretation of Plato’s banishment of poetry. Instead, (...) I am using the banishment as a springboard for discussion of Badiou’s notion of poetry as the ‘birth of truth’ in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. I will examine the way this text interacts with Plato’s conceptual banishment. I assert that this interaction should illuminate the status of writing — especially artistic writing — in the state. (shrink)

The narrative of Plato’s cave story is loaded with ‘some of the most suggestive opposites in the repertoire, namely the contrasts between down and up, darkness and light, chains and freedom’ (Hrach...

Major difficulties for readers of Foucault’s The Order of Things concern the historical function and the logical construction of the episteme. Our proposal is to link it with another notion, the ‘point of heresy’, less frequently addressed. This leads to asserting that irreconcilable dilemmas are in fact determined by the type of rationality governing the emergence of common objects of knowledge. It also introduces a possibility of ‘walking on two roads’: a dialogical adventure within rationality. Foucault is not content with (...) either accepting or rejecting the ‘transcendental’ question ‘What is Man?’: with the help of quasi-transcendental categories performing a ‘transdisciplinary’ function, he wants to reach the ‘heretical’ point where anthropology becomes historicity within the horizon of finitude. (shrink)

pThis bibliography presents a complete list of the work on and by Badiou currently available in English. The bibliography separates the works by Badiou, from the lsquo;Commentaries on Badioursquo;s Workrsquo;./p.