Concept and Form, Volume 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse

by Peter Hallward (Editor), Knox Peden (Editor), Alain Badiou (Contribution by), Yves Duroux (Contribution by), Alain Grosrichard (Contribution by)

Overview

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.

This first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation: Alain Badiou, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Serge Leclaire, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, and François Regnault.The book is complemented by a second volume, consisting of essays and interviews that assess the significance and legacy of the journal, and by an online edition of the full set of original Cahiers texts, produced by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and accessible at cahiers.kingston.ac.uk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844678723
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	12/12/2012
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is the author of several books including Absolutely Postcolonial, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, and Damming the Flood.

Knox Peden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.

Jacques-Alain Miller is Director of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII and editor of Lacan’s Seminars.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Abbreviations ix

Introduction to Volume One: 'Theoretical Training' Peter Hallward 1

1 Forewords to the Cahiers volumes 1-9 57

2 'Action of the Structure' Jacques-Alain Miller 69

3 'Psychology and Logic' Yves Duroux 85

4 'Structure (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)' Jacques-Alain Miller 91

5 'The Analyst in His Place?' Serge Leclaire 103

6 'The Point of the Signifier' Jean-Claude Milner 107

7 'Dialectic of Epistemologies' François Regnault 119

8 'Questions for Michel Foucault' The Cercle d'Épistémologie 151

9 'Mark and Lack' Alain Badiou 159

10 'Infinitesimal Subversion' Alain Badiou 187

11 'An Eighteenth-Century Psychological Experiment' (followed by Chevalier de Mérian, 'The History of Molyneux's Problem') Alain Grosrichard 209

12 'The Thought of the Prince' François Regnault 229

Appendix: The Cahiers pour l'Analyse, Tables of Contents 259