For the reader in a hurry - and in particular for the most likely reader, the one who does not have the ordinarily useless knowledge of axiomatic set theory - the most effective way to apprehend Badiou's philosophical thought is to read his little book : Happiness in its English version and Métaphysique du bonheur réel in its original French version. Badiou wrote this book in 2015 while still working on The Immanence of Truths, which will be published in September (...) 2018. It sums up his thinking well. Badiou, through the whole of his philosophical work, theorizes "real" happiness, "real life". In his own words, he is building a "metaphysics of real happiness". What do the words "real" and "metaphysics" mean here? (shrink)

To say that the coherence of what time shows us is infallible is not yet to say that time is logic itself. But that's what we're going to say here, or at least that it's in the form of time that logic first shows itself to us, before it regulates the reasoning of our imagination. The book sets out and explains the four statements on which phenomenological metaphysics is based : The first statement was made by Heidegger in his inaugural (...) lecture " What is metaphysics ? " in 1929. It says: " It is nothingness itself that annihilates ". The second statement, as yet unpublished, says that the means that nothingness uses to annihilate is logic, and that the first form of logic is time, the second form, the one we know as our logic formal logic or the logic of predicates , is imagination. Imagination extends and complements the logical work of time by mimicking it. The third statement, the one least acceptable to common truth, says that the first three fundamental statements of phenomenology are not comprehensible by common truth, by common sense, by logos. In particular, the first statement was considered nonsense first by Rudolf Carnap, then by W. V. O. Quine. To understand the first three statements, a singular event must occur in a man's life : the event that brings nothingness and its contradiction into being in the same instant. This contradiction is Being itself, the madness of being. The third statement says that the truth of being is not transmissible. Each of us accesses it in our own time. The fourth and final statement is the only one that science can accept, even though it has never posited it. This statement is the generalized principle of contradiction. It states that in all circumstances, what time shows us is absolutely consistent : time is never wrong. If Aristotle's principle of contradiction is the foundation of our logic, the generalized principle of contradiction is the foundation of experimental science. -/- All that time, immemorial time, which precedes man's access to the truth of being, is referred to here as childhood. The world, physis, common sense, common truth, logos, remain in childhood. Only man emerges into Being. The world is then offered to him as a gift, the gift that time - logic - gives to Being. (shrink)

There is no mention of Kafka in Heidegger's work. Did Heidegger ignore him, or pretend to? It's possible that he didn't read anything by Kafka until 1945. In 1933, Kafka was still little-known in Germany; then the Nazis banned and destroyed publications by Jews. From 1945 onwards, Kafka became a fashionable author. Heidegger didn't care about fashion. In 1950, Hannah Arendt, who had renewed her acquaintance with Heidegger, gave him the gift of a collection of Kafka's works. Hannah Arendt wrote (...) two articles on Kafka, in 1944 and 1948. The first was published in Germany in 1948 (Heidelberg), in a collection entitled Sechs Essays. Heidegger must have read it, sooner or later. It's possible that he discovered Kafka after 1950, but we can't be sure. Yet Kafka's work, the one which he did not publish himself, foreshadows that of Heidegger. In particular, if Heidegger read A Dog’s search, he must have received a shock. He said nothing about it. (shrink)