Cirrus@Austlit

'In the middle of a Sydney winter at the turn of the century, Alain Badiou scrawled a message in a copy of Being and Event (1988): ‘For Melissa, in friendship, and in memory of a very dense and very happy trip to Sydney’. The book didn’t exist yet in English; its author was virtually unknown outside of France. At the time—in the late 1990s—only a handful of Badiou’s works were available in English, the most notable being a critical commentary on Gilles Deleuze translated by the Australian philosopher Louise Burchill. So, what had brought Badiou to Sydney? Most immediately, it was Oliver Feltham. Feltham was a young Australian philosopher who had come back from Paris with a plan to bring Badiou to Australia. He contacted the Sydney-based philosopher Melissa McMahon, who helped arrange for Badiou to speak at the 1999 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s ‘To Be Done with Judgement’ conference. There Badiou delivered a paper on ‘The Part and the Whole’ and, on the conference’s final night, launched the English translation of Manifesto for Philosophy (1991). The launch, at Gleebooks, was poorly attended: a few diffident graduate students and academics milled about the bookshelves. A photograph from the event shows Badiou towering (he is very tall) and affectless, arms crossed, besides John Bacon, a logician from Sydney.' (Introduction)