Badiou's Nietzsche seminar reaches print as 'Anti-Philosophy 1'

The seminars Alain Badiou gave over more than thirty years are appearing volume by volume from Columbia University Press. The newest link in the chain came out in June: Nietzsche: Anti-Philosophy 1.

Susan Spitzer translated the volume into English; Bruno Bosteels wrote the introduction.

What is an anti-philosopher?#

Badiou's central concept in these seminars is anti-philosophy. The term is not a slight; it describes a type.

On his account, the history of philosophy contains, alongside the philosophers who object to philosophy from within, thinkers who take philosophy itself for an illusion and attack it from outside. They build no philosophical system. What they aim at is philosophy's claim to produce concepts.

Among the figures Badiou counts as anti-philosophers are Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan.

The move they have in common is this. Truth is a matter not of the concept but of an act, a transformation, a decision about how to live. No concept can stand in for that act.

Why Nietzsche qualifies#

Nietzsche fits the description as well as anyone. In his own texts he calls philosophers "mummifiers of concepts"; he treats the appetite for system-building as a failure of honesty; he prefers the aphorism, the poem and the narrative to the argument.

On Badiou's reading, Nietzsche's intention is not to found a philosophy but to produce an event that will split world history in two. The note sounded in Nietzsche's late writings — "I am breaking the history of mankind in half" — is for Badiou no rhetorical excess. It is the structural consequence of anti-philosophy.

Why Badiou takes the trouble#

The tension here explains Badiou's own position as well.

Badiou says openly that he is a philosopher, and indeed a Platonist. He holds that ontology is mathematics; he builds a system; he defends the concept. The anti-philosophers stand directly across from him.

Yet he does not belittle them. On the contrary, he counts them the opponents philosophy has most need to take seriously. A philosopher who cannot withstand the anti-philosopher's objection, on his view, cannot ground his own position either.

That is the methodological lesson of the seminar: you cannot answer the strongest objection until you understand it as well as the person who believes it most.

The seminar series#

Columbia's The Seminars of Alain Badiou publishes transcriptions of the courses Badiou gave from the 1980s onwards. Volumes on Lacan, Malebranche, Heidegger and Plato have already appeared; Parmenides: Ontological Figure, Being 1 came out in 2025.

The seminars offer a different kind of text from Badiou's books. What one reads here is not a finished argument but the process by which the argument was assembled.

Badiou in Turkish#

Etik (Ethics), Sonsuz Düşünce (Infinite Thought), Başka Bir Estetik (Handbook of Inaesthetics) and Yüzyıl (The Century) are among his books translated into Turkish. No Turkish translation of the anti-philosophy seminars has yet been announced.