Alain Badiou

A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other
J - A MILLER

Towards a New Concept of Existence
ALAIN BADIOU

35 Propositions from Logiques des mondes
ALAIN BADIOU

Desublimation
GÉRARD WAJCMAN

The Element of Sacrifice in Romantic Love
RUSSELL GRIGG

Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Marxism
IAN PARKER

Materialism, or the Inexistence of the Big Other
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Janine Antoni
JOSEFINA AYERZA

Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens
JOSEFINA AYERZA

[...] As all of you know perfectly well, the fundamental problem is to distinguish on the one hand, being as such, being qua being, and, on the other hand, existence, as a category which precisely is not reducible to that of being. It is the heart of the matter. This difference between being and existence is often the result of the consideration of a special type of being. It is the case for Heidegger, with the distinction between Sein and Dasein. If we take into account the etymological framework, we can see that "existence," which depends on Dasein, is a topological concept. It means to be here, to be in the world. And in fact, I also shall propose to determine the very general concept of "existence" by the necessity of thinking the place, or the world, of everything which is. And this place is not deducible from being as such.

But clearly for Heidegger, Da-sein, and finally, existence, is a name for human being, for historical destiny of thinking, for crucial and creative experience of the becoming of being itself. I shall propose a concept of being-here and of existence without any reference to something like consciousness, experience, or human being. I shall construct before you a pure relational concept of the slight distance between a multiplicity and the same multiplicity here, in its place, in a world.

The Thing is: das Ding, maybe das Ur-Ding. That is this form of being which certainly is after the indifference of nothingness, but also before the qualitative difference of object. We must formalize the concept of "thing" between, on the one hand, the absolute priority of nothingness and, on the other hand, the complexity of objects. A thing is always the pre-objective basis of objectivity. And that is the reason for which a thing is nothing other than a multiplicity. Not a multiplicity of objects, not a system of qualities, a network of differences, but a multiplicity of multiplicities, and a multiplicity of multiplicities of multiplicities.

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