Walter Benjamin: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 (1994)

“Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin’s correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.”

Edited and Annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno
Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0226042375, 9780226042374
674 pages

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Alain Badiou: The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic (1977–)

“The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May ‘68. With the late 1970’s “triumphant restoration” in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou’s more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a ‘communist hypothesis’. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.”

Originally published as Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne, François Maspero, 1977

Alain Badiou, Joel Bellassen, and Louis Mossot’s translations, introductions and commentary on a text by Zhang Shiying
Edited and translated by Tzuchien Tho
Publisher Re.press, Victoria, Australia, December 2011
Transmission series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5 License
ISBN 978-0-9808197-6-2
138 pages

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Alain Badiou: The Concept of Model. An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics (1969–)

“The Concept of Model is the first of Alain Badiou’s early books to be translated fully into English. With this publication English readers finally have access to a crucial work by one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. Written on the eve of the events of May 1968, The Concept of Model provides a solid mathematical basis for a rationalist materialism. Badiou’s concept of model distinguishes itself from both logical positivism and empiricism by introducing a new form of break into the hitherto implicated realms of science and ideology, and establishing a new way to understand their disjunctive relation. Readers coming to Badiou for the first time will be struck by the clarity and force of his presentation, and the key place that The Concept of Model enjoys in the overall development of Badiou’s thought will enable readers already familiar with his work to discern the lineaments of his later radical developments. This translation is accompanied by a stunning new interview with Badiou in which he elaborates on the connections between his early and most recent thought.”

First published as Le concept de modèle, Maspero, Paris, 1969.

Edited by Zachary L. Frazer and Tzuchien Tho
Publisher Re.press, December 2007
Transmission series
Open Access
ISBN 9780980305234
180 pages

Keywords and phrases
Alain Badiou, ontology, epistemological break, Althusserian, axiom of choice, formal system, Jacques-Alain Miller, model theory, mathematical logic, Michel Serres, ideology, deduction theorem, suture, Justin Clemens, free variable, semantic, logical positivism, mathematical production, Louis Althusser, Dialectical Materialism

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