On Modern Platonist Alain Badiou:"Thinking the Event" to Distinguish the Real from Images on the Wall

“Think the event” is central to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, a modern Platonist who has been writing and lecturing in philosophy for over five decades. Badiou said, “Philosophy is the seizure of thought of what breaks with the sleep of thought,” because real truth is found by looking for the exceptions and finding the important connections in time that we have overlooked. Badiou’s insight is that you can’t see until your eyes have been opened by an “event,” and to his thinking events happen like shockwaves that shake the scales from your eyes and allow you to see something you missed before because you were so invested in one way of looking at the world.

In discussing selections from Badiou’s writing and lectures from several decades ago, James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick found many connections between the the polarized politics of tod ...