Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology Book

As Badiou himself mentions in the preface, this book is something of a milestone charting the journey from Being and Event to The Logics of Worlds. As such the conclusions this book reaches remain tentative and provisional. This book announces a project that remains unfulfilled, its promise deferred. Now that The Logics of Worlds has finally been published in English translation, the (alleged) unfolding and completion of the project announced and glimpsed in Briefings on Existence is (supposedly) realized. However, since I have not yet read The Logics of Worlds, and to the extent that this work remains inextricably bound up with that one, anything I might say about this work necessarily retains something of a provisional character. One gets the impression that Briefings on Existence constitutes a sort of theoretical "vanishing mediator" between the two major works.

However, one final point remains to be observed, and that is the fact that a good portion of this book (close to half the chapters) has been presented, in alternative translations, in the volume published under the title Theoretical Writings. My impression, having read that volume as well, is that the translations presented there are generally superior, but since only some of them are presented, and those there in a different order, the general framework and argument, the interconnection of these chapters, in short the sense of journey that Briefings on Existence conveys, is there missed. To sum up, any formulation on whether this book remains a crucial part of Badiou's ouevre, and its role therein--the question of whether or not this work is superseded by later ones or variant anthologies, or some combination thereof--at this point requires a reading of The Logics of Worlds, and any definitive statement must be postponed until that has been accomplished.