Alain Badiou 
Black 
The Brilliance of a Non-Color

Who hasn’t had the frightening experience of stumbling around in the pitch dark? Alain Badiou experienced that primitive terror when he, with his young friends, made up a game called ‘The Stroke of Midnight.’ The furtive discovery of the dark continent of sex in banned magazines, the beauty of black ink on paper, but also the mysteries of space and the grief of mourning: these are some of the things we encounter as the philosopher takes us on a trip through the private theater of his mind, at the whim of his memories. Music, painting, politics, sex, and metaphysics: all contribute to making black more luminous than it has ever been.

Tabella dei contenuti

Translator’s note

Childhood and youth

Military black

The Stroke of Midnight

The black dog in the dark

The inkwell

Chalk and markers

Confusions

Early sexuality

The dialectics of black

Dialectical ambiguities

Black souls

Soulages’ ultrablack

Flags

Red and black. And white. And violet.

Stendhal: the red and the black

The dark desire of/for darkness

Clothing

The black sign

Black humor, or black vs. black

Outward appearance

Physics, biology, and anthropology

The metaphorical black of the Cosmos

The secret blackness of plants

Animal black

An invention of white people

Circa l’autore

Alain Badiou is a writer, philosopher, and an Emeritus Professor at the Ecole n
Normale Superieure, Paris.