Summary
Alain Badiou: Manifesto for Philosophy
"We will therefore establish that there are four conditions of philosophy, the absence of one of which leads to its disintegration, just as their joint appearance made its appearance possible. These conditions are: math, poem, political invention and love. (...) Philosophy is by no means finished. But the persistence of the remnants of the kingdom of the One, and precisely they represent counter-'nihilistic' nihilism, because they prevent the procedures of truth and represent the opposite obstacle to the ontology of deterrence, which is its historical medium, leads to the thought that philosophy has been suspended for a long time. Although it is possible today, and therefore necessary, to untie philosophy and make its rebirth known; although after its long delay caused by the permanent and destructive privileges of the scientific condition (positivism), the political condition (Marxism) and the poetic condition (from Nietzsche to the present), it becomes imperative to re-form the four conditions of grounded teaching about truth; although after giving up the repeated claims about "the end of philosophy", "the end of metaphysics", "the crisis of reason", the "deconstruction of the subject" the task is to reassemble the thread of modern reasoning, to take another step in the sequence of "Cartesian meditation" - all this would be only arbitrary voluntarism if what founded it did not acquire the status of key events that happened suddenly, albeit as part of still undefined or temporary appointments, in the register of each of the four conditions. It is the events of mathematics, the thoughts of love, and the possibility of having a place of refuge for what can be named from now on. Today, the century and Europe must be cured of anti-Platonism as long as it offers, according to the measure of time, a new level of thought in Europe.
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