L'Éclat de l'absolu

This event will be held in English

Why is affirmative thinking necessary to overcome the present political crisis? How does a “truth procedure” transform the human subject? The philosopher Alain Badiou, Nick Nesbitt, a leading expert on Louis Althusser and on Caribbean thinkers, and Jana Ndiaye Berankova, currently a Fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, will discuss the present social crisis and the importance of the notions of the absolute, the universal, and the truth. They will present L’Éclat de l’absolu (The Splendor of the Absolute), a series of interviews that Berankova conducted with Badiou over five years, from 2014 to 2019, in New York, Paris, and Prague, as we celebrate the publication of its first French edition by Suture Press.

L’Éclat de l’absolu offers perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic collection of interviews realized to date on Badiou’s philosophical “masters”: Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, and Deleuze. These dialogues are a true anamnesis, supported by a profound knowledge of the work of Badiou and other thinkers and by a constant return to the texts. They offer new and sometimes more accessible points of view on his major works such as Being and Event (1988) and The Immanence of Truths (2018) as well as considerations on the problems of Marxism, on the critique of the party-state, the role of the absolute and the possibilities to overcome the death drive and to reconcile conscious and unconscious spheres of a human psyche.

To honor the “classical” aspects of Badiou’s complex system of thought, L’Éclat de l’absolu is published in a hardcover edition with a golden foil-stamp print and includes drawings inspired by baroque engravings and the French Encyclopedia made by Alexey Klyuykov a Czech artist of Russian origin. A true editorial work of art and a book-lovers’ dream, this book opens new paths for the future of philosophy.

Suture Press books can be purchased during the event or ordered via their e-shop.

Alain Badiou is a philosopher, a novelist and a playwright. He was one of the founding members of the philosophy department at the University of Paris VIII – Vincennes and is professor emeritus at the École normale supérieure. His main works are Being and Event (1988), Logics of Worlds (2006), and The Immanence of Truths (2018).

Jana Ndiaye Berankova is an art and architecture theorist, philosopher, writer, and publisher. She studied art history and comparative literature at the École normale supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France) and architecture at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD dissertation on the links between architecture theory and French philosophy from 1965 to 1990. At the Institute, Ndiaye Berankova is working on a project focusing on the theoretical discourse on architecture and urban planning between the 1960s and the end of 1980s in Senegal. She runs Suture Press, a non-profit publishing house focusing on carefully designed hardback books on continental philosophy, contemporary art, and architectural theory.

Nick Nesbitt is a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. His research interests include Marxism, the thought of Alain Badiou and Louis Althusser, and Caribbean thinkers. He is the author of Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic, Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (2024), The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (2013), and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008).