Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Translated by Bruno Bosteels

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192 pages / July 2019 / 9781844672240

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July 2019 / 9781788734646

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Stunning reassessment of Wittgenstein from France's most famous contemporary philosopher

Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy and anatomizes the “antiphilosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s thinking, Badiou refines his own definitions of the universal truths that govern his work. Bruno Bosteels’s introduction argues that a continuing dialogue with Wittgenstein is inescapable for contemporary philosophy.

Reviews

A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us.

Slavoj Žižek

An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser.

New Statesman

“The story of Wittgenstein’s career is that of coming to believe that philosophy’s salvation lies in its aspiring to the condition of poetry. For Badiou, as a Platonist, that is a counsel of despair.”

New Statesman

Read all 6 reviews

“Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy is another attempt to shore up the division between Anglo-American and European philosophy. But in doing so the ancillary effect is a text that also brings the two traditions into an unlikely conversation.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Though Badiou’s studies fall outside the mainstream of research into Wittgenstein’s philosophy, they are thought-provoking and contain bold statements and innovative interpretations.”
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
“Antiphilosophy and the valorization of the mystical is anathema to Badiou, it smacks of religious faith, but he is not immune to the power of Wittgenstein’s thought and he worries at it like a dog with a bone. The two philosophers share a tight cogency in their writing that does not suffer foolish words gladly and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy is, in its own way, as carefully packed as the Tractatus. It is a book to read slowly, to re-read and ponder what drove Wittgenstein to argue and formulate so compellingly the notion that the only truth worth its name is that which results in an affirmative when a proposition is compared with empirical reality.”
Irish Left Review

“Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy is another attempt to shore up the division between Anglo-American and European philosophy. But in doing so the ancillary effect is a text that also brings the two traditions into an unlikely conversation.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Though Badiou’s studies fall outside the mainstream of research into Wittgenstein’s philosophy, they are thought-provoking and contain bold statements and innovative interpretations.”
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
“Antiphilosophy and the valorization of the mystical is anathema to Badiou, it smacks of religious faith, but he is not immune to the power of Wittgenstein’s thought and he worries at it like a dog with a bone. The two philosophers share a tight cogency in their writing that does not suffer foolish words gladly and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy is, in its own way, as carefully packed as the Tractatus. It is a book to read slowly, to re-read and ponder what drove Wittgenstein to argue and formulate so compellingly the notion that the only truth worth its name is that which results in an affirmative when a proposition is compared with empirical reality.”
Irish Left Review