The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School

by Alain Badiou, Duane Rousselle (Editor)

Alain Badiou occupies the place of the teacher whose primary responsibility rests on the transmission of tradition. The transmission occurs as a consequence of the teacher, the master, the professor, or, as it happens, the old man. Clearly, Badiou occupies all of these roles. However, what concerns us today is that he is an old man and that the old man is the man who is approaching death. In fact, he does not shy away from this designation. Rather, he acknowledges this point with a "Do not say that I am really a young man because it is not true. I know that I am seventy-five years old." Our teacher is fully aware that he is at the "beginning of the last straight line of life." The possibility of the death of the old man necessitates a thinking about the preservation of the transmission of the future. The Subject of Change is a sustained engagement with the concept of change. The questions it asks what is a change?, what is a true change?, is change better than immobility?, what are the different types of change?, and, finally, what is the localization of change?

142 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2013

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.