The Philosophy of Law of Alain Badiou

Igor Stramignoni, London School of Economics, Law Department, has published Seizing Truths: Art, Politics, Law at Art and Law 73 (O. Ben-Dor, ed. Routledge, 2011). Here is the abstract.

The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been described as the most powerful alternative yet conceived in France to the various forms of postmodernism that arose after the collapse of the Marxist project. Art interests Badiou in its own right but also as both that which, in the twentieth century, eclipsed philosophy and as that which today philosophy, increasingly de-sutured from art, must imitate in order to make clear that there are truths after all. Badiou conceives of law, on the other hand, as part and parcel of a specific political machine that must continuously perform certain problematic exclusions if it is to keep the fiction of parliamentary democracy together. So how is the relationship between art and law, between the poet and the city, in Badiou’s oeuvre?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A shorter version of this essay was presented to the symposium on 'Law and Art: Ethics, Aesthetics and Justice', held at Tate Modern London in March 2010, and it was published in LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 14/2010.