Nick Nesbitt: Cavailles - Althusser - Badiou: On the Logic and Theory of Politics

What Does the Word Materialism Means Today? Location: Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague Date: September 5, 2016 The last century has seen an extraordinary efflorescence of materialist thinking. Materialism has become the dominant opinion of our times; the debates trying to answer the question what is to be done are now framed within the materialism itself. Alain Badiou, in the preface to Logics of Worlds, opposed materialist dialectics to contemporary doxa of democratic materialism. According to Badiou, democratic materialism is a doctrine sustaining limitations of parliamentary democracies; it is a conviction according to which only bodies and languages exist. Democratic materialism is closely related to biopolitics, to embeddedness of human beings within their environment, to deposition of every language that would pretend to overcome particularity. Postmodernity as such inscribes itself within the regime of democratic materialism. Badiou proposes mater