Alain Badiou

And I wanna add a couple points about your biography, just by way of introduction, that you are the author of a very important work.

And I say this in a selfish way, because it was very important for me, entitled, Post-Foundation Political Thought, Political Difference in Nancy, Laforte, Badiou, and Laclau with Edinburgh University Press, came out in 2007.

You also co-edited The Laclau Critical Reader with Simon Critchley, amongst many other articles and other books.

And we'll learn a little bit more about what drove you to your research, your interest in Laclau and so on in a moment.

But when I was writing my dissertation, I remember this book achieved something that I didn't think was achievable, which was to finally give sense to the post-structuralist moment and to provide a kind of higher level perspective.

grounding of the of what these seminal thinkers seminal philosophers were actually what they shared in common you know and what they shared in common was this notion of a post-foundation political ontology now that's a little bit complex because uh that is largely owed but not exclusively owed to the thought of martin heidegger and say, for example, you include Badiou, and I know Badiou well enough, and I've read being in an event to know that he would not ever call himself a left-wing Heidegger scholar, but many of these other thinkers would, like Nancy.

And Laclau, maybe it's a little more complex, in fact, when we talk about Heidegger's influence.

So Professor Marchart, if we could begin with a sense first, since we're talking about your more recent work on Laclau, let us begin with why Ernesto Laclau's work stands out to you as so essential, so seminal for thinking contemporary politics.

I'm like, I'm going to tweak my brain so that my art is more satisfying to me.

Yeah, so it's a form of what Badiou would call an anti-philosophy, in a good way.

It's like he puts Lacan as an anti-philosopher, not because he's not a thinker, It's just because it's a philosophy that has an other end than philosophy itself.

Which I think of as

unrelated to pre-existing methods that have been the basis of composition for the past 300 years.

This is why Badiou is so obsessed with Schoenberg's

twelfth time.

This is why he names it an event in music.

Because it completely restructures the field of music composition and how music can be represented.

It's also fascinating that notes then get represented by numbers as well and that gives you all sorts of because if I'm now kind of like having to like cast my mind back to looking at Cage but then there's all these like weird questions of the relationship between composition and mathematics when you have numeric like number representations of notes and things like that yeah and obviously yeah that's like

alive and kicking in the Badiou world thanks to the work of François Nicolas and the seminar on mathematics music and philosophy at IACAN that is still going.

But one of the things, because in my PhD thesis, I actually, and I think I told you at the time, worked on this sort of musical event in Schoenberg and took it through Xenakis on the one hand and Pierre Boulez on the other hand.

This is a bit of a packed section.

Badiou, Batekinar, which is Dutch for signifier, right?

That's right, signifier.

Then Bion, Bordieu, and Bricolage.

Phew.

Let's maybe start with Badiou and his concept of the event.

Okay, good you.

He sees an event as something that fundamentally punches a hole in our existing understanding of the world.