Bruno Bosteels on Hegel and Badiou
April 22, 2026
Columbia University
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Core Readings
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), please focus on Part I, pp. 1-50 and Part III, pp. 111-176.Alain Badiou, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, trans. Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re:press, 2011).
Alain Badiou, “Hegel in France,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 19-26.
Mao Zedong, Five Essays on Philosophy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), especially “On Contradiction” and “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” pp. 23-133.
Resources
Alain Badiou, “One Divides into Two,” in Lenin Reloaded, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 7-17.
Bosteels’ translator’s introduction to Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, pp. vii-xxviii.Bruno Bosteels, “Hegel,” in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010), pp. 137-145.
Bruno Bosteels, “Hegel in America,” in Hegel & the Infinite. Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 67-90.
Bruno Bosteels, “Hegel in America: New Hypotheses” (unpublished manuscript).Bruno Bosteels, “Marx’s Theory of the Subject,” in Accumulation and Subjectivity in Latin America, ed. Karen Benezra (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022), pp. 255-274.
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Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory. He is the author of Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico (Palinodia), Alain Badiou: une trajectoire polémique (La Fabrique, translated into German as Alain Badiou: Werdegang eines Streitbaren with Laika), Badiou and Politics (Duke, translated into Spanish as Badiou y lo político with Prometeo Libros), The Actuality of Communism (Verso, translated into German with Laika as Die Aktualität des Kommunismus, into Korean with a new preface by Galmuri as 공산주의의 현실성 : 현실성의 존재론과 실행의 정치, into Serbian with Univerzitet Singidunum as Aktuelnost Komunizma, and into Spanish with Prometeo Libros as La actualidad del comunismo, forthcoming in Japanese with Koshisha), Marx and Freud in Latin America (Verso, Spanish translation as Marx y Freud en América Latina with Akal), El marxismo en América Latina: Nuevos caminos al comunismo(Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia), El pensamiento de Oscar del Barco: De Marx a Heidegger (Ariel Pennisi), La comuna mexicana (Akal-Mexico, 2021; second edition Akal-Spain, 2022; forthcoming in English as The Mexican Commune with Duke University Press); and ¿Qué es la antifilosofía? (Prometeo Libros, 2024). Between 2005 and 2011 he served as general editor of Diacritics: Review of Contemporary Thought. He is currently preparing two new books, the first a sustained polemical engagement with contemporary post-Heideggerian thought, titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso); and the second, a collection of recent and previously unpublished essays under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press). With Joshua Clover he co-edits the book series “Studies in Literature and Revolution” for Palgrave Macmillan; and with George Ciccariello-Maher the book series “Radical Américas” for Duke University Press. He is also the translator from French to English and/or editor of over half a dozen books by Alain Badiou, among them Theory of the Subject (Continuum/Bloomsbury), Philosophy for Militants (Verso), Rhapsody for the Theatre (Verso), Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (Verso), The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose (Verso), The Adventures of French Philosophy (Verso), Can Politics Be Thought? (Duke), and Badiou by Badiou (Stanford). He recently translated the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner’s Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (Brill) and is finishing the translation of Alain Badiou’s Nietzsche (Columbia University Press).
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We are also planning a seminar on Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Martin, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida
Louis Althusser (1947), Jacques Martin (1947), and Michel Foucault (1949) wrote their masters’ theses on Hegel. Gilles Deleuze (1968) wrote his doctoral thesis against Hegel. And a few years later, Jacques Derrida deconstructed Hegel in his book Glas (1974).
In each case, their early interest in Hegel would shape their mature writings and politics. For instance, in his master’s thesis, La constitution d’un transcendantal historique dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, Foucault explored the relationship between the transcendental conditions of experience and the Hegelian dialectic and theory of history. This tied directly to Foucault’s emerging theory of experience, which was his effort at developing a materialist philosophy—and would guide all of his later work.
In this segment, then, we return to the early writings of Althusser, Martin, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, to explore their early interest in Hegel and how it shaped their later thought and politics.
Core Readings
Louis Althusser, “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel,” in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, ed. François Matheron (New York: Verso, 2014 [1947]) (master’s thesis), https://www.versobooks.com/products/1576-the-spectre-of-hegel.
Jacques Martin, L’individu chez Hegel, ed. Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod (Paris: ENS Éditions, 2020 [1947]) (master’s thesis).
Michel Foucault, La constitution d’un transcendantal historique dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel. Mémoire du diplôme d’études supérieures de philosophie (Paris, Vrin: 2024 [1949]) (master’s thesis).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]) (principal thesis for the Doctorat D’État).
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986 [1974]).
Bruno Bosteels, “Difference,” in Finitude (work-in-progress).
Additional Readings
Bernard E. Harcourt, “A Preface to Experience,” foreword to Michel Foucault, Binswanger and Existential Analysis, trans. Marie McDonough (New York: Columbia University Press, 2025).
Pierre Macherey, “Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?,” Theory, Culture & Society, 40(1-2), 19-36 (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221084903.
Oliver Roberts-Garratt, “Foucault’s Hegel Thesis: The ‘Tragic Destiny’ of Life and the ‘Being-There’ of Consciousness,” Foucault Studies, no. 36 (September 2024): 443-469, available at https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i36.7227.
Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod, La Naissance de l’anti-hégélianisme. Louis Althusser et Michel Foucault, lecteurs de Hegel(Paris: ENS Éditions, 2022).
Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod, La révolution trahie : Deleuze contre Hegel (Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2023)