Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time

Description

This exciting new book makes a major contribution to Continental philosophy, bringing together for the first time the crucial work on politics by two giants of contemporary French philosophy, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. Derrida has long been recognised as one of the most influential and indeed controversial thinkers in contemporary philosophy and Badiou is fast emerging as a central figure in French thought, as well as in Anglo-American philosophy - his magnum opus, Being and Event, and its long-awaited sequel, Logics of Worlds, have confirmed his position as one of the most significant thinkers working in philosophy today. Both philosophers have devoted a substantial amount of their oeuvre to politics and the question of the nature of the political. Here Antonio Calcagno shows how the political views of these two major thinkers diverge and converge, thus providing a comprehensive exposition of their respective political systems. Both Badiou and Derrida give the event a central role in structuring politics and political thinking and Calcagno advances a theory about the relationship between political events and time that can account for both political undecidability and decidability. This book navigates some very intriguing developments in Continental thought and offers a clear and fascinating account of the political theories of two major contemporary thinkers.

Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College, Western University, Canada.

Mention- The Chronicle Review, January 18, 2008 "Antonio Calcagno engages in a detailed examination of the relationship between politics and time through the works of Derrida and Badiou...Calcagno has produced a book that will not only be of great interest to scholars of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, but also to those engaged with the ongoing debated on politics in our time. Because of its clarity in exposition, this book is accessible to a broad range of readers from different disciplines in the humanities and most especially to those interested in philosophy." -Gabriel Rivera, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, May 2, 2008 "...his description of Derrida's democracy to come is clear and brilliant, the stuff of a sustained and insightful mind at work." -Darren Jorgenson, Bible and Critical Theory, 2009