The Age of the Poets

A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us! - Slavoj Zizek An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. - New Statesman Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France's anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. - BBC HARDtalk One of the most important philosophers writing today. - Joan Copjec
The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.