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ABSTRACT: In this paper I perform a critical reading of the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic in order to outline Badiou’s approach to political education. Despite claiming that “the only education is an education by truths” Badiou never explicitly discusses his notion of education. However, Badiou’s way of turning to Plato seems to reveal an ambition to re-establish the importance of the link between truth and political education.
I start by portraying Badiou’s way of reimagining and renewing Plato’s classical text. In Badiou’s hypertranslation, Socrates and his companions are joined by figures such as Beckett, Pessoa, Freud and Hegel. And these figures do not simply agree with Socrates: they dispute, debate, discuss, contest and argue. Badiou’s hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic thus demonstrates thoughts in motion.
Next, I read these “thoughts in motion” against Badiou’s logic. In doing so I point to how Badiou – especially in his Logic of Worlds – models the potential powers of such thinking. Through his key concepts “conditions”, “event”, “fidelity” and “truths” Badiou models thinking (thoughts in motion) as a dialogical, productive subject. However, to be beneficial, thinking must be directed towards truths. To Badiou, truths – or rather generic truth procedures – “pierce a hole in knowledge” as they interrupt, disturb and are subtracted from the circulating rule of opinion. As Badiou states that “the only education is an education by truths”, it is exactly this notion of education he depicts by his hyper-translation of Plato’s Republic.
In the main part of the paper I take the way Badiou re-writes Plato’s allegory of the cave to illustrate Badiou’s notion of education. At the first analytic level, this allegory pictures education as a trajectory, a move away from illusio, beyond doxa and towards noesis. At the next level, the allegory illustrates thoughts in motion; a generic truth procedure that not only trouble Socrates, Amantha and Glaucon’s conventional beliefs of education, but also the very foundation of their beliefs. At the third level, however, the very ways in which Badiou’s hyper - translation re-writes, discusses and amplifies generic truth procedures, illustrates how the work of philosophy may give new impetus to the potential powers of generic truths. Truths are generic in the sense of truth-procedures that reveal or unfold something entirely new, something that cannot be grasped or apprehended by the already established categories of the discourse, and thus goes beyond the situation: “Created in one world, it is in fact valid for other worlds and virtually to all”. In other words, Badiou’s hyper - translation of the Republic cannot unilaterally be read as an actualization of Plato's classic text. It should also be read as a renewal and strengthening of the truths that originated with Plato and still characterizes the western world’s master discourse on education. It is also a comment to this discourse’s blind spots. We - the readers – are thus invited to participate in the movable thinking that originated with Plato and which is here re-presented and re-conceived by Badiou.
References
Badiou, A. (2012). Plato’s Republic. Cambridge: Polity Press
Badiou, A. (2009). Logic of Worlds. Being and Event II. Bloomsbury: Continuum
Bartlett, A. J. (2011). Badiou and Plato. An Education by Truths. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press