Hic Rhodus Hic Salta: Two Hegels in China

Abstract

In the article the author addresses the meaning of Alain Badiou’s idea that philosophy thinks under the condition of politics by looking at a 1977 text, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, written during a period before this very idea, articulated by a “theory of conditions”, had been developed. The peculiarity of this text not only attests to the powerful set of political, historical, geographical, and linguistic factors at work in this difficult period in Badiou’s thought, but also enables a different sort of insight into the messy grounds from which the late formation of his more mature work developed, including Theory of the Subject, written just a few years later, and the two volumes of Being and Event.