This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France today: Alain Badiou and the author, François Laruelle.
At face value, the two have much in common: both espouse a position of absolute immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science; and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one science: mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of 'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.
In Robin MacKay's excellent translation, we see Laruelle's performative thought at work in pristine form, taking what poses today to be the philosophy of its age - Badiouism - and re-envisioning it as one part of the Real rather than its whole. Throughout, we are shown where Badiou and Laruelle, so similar in respect to vocabulary, yet worlds apart in terms of ambition, fundamentally differ: where the one embraces all human practice under its philosophical authority, the other opens this philosophy up to the myriad mutations of non-standard thinking. The stance of Anti-Badiou is not to negate or replace Badiou's picture of reality with another, but only to see it as one amongst many within a democracy of thought.
