Watch Badiou, the First Feature-Length Film on France’s Most Famous Living Philosopher

Above you can watch Badiou, the first fea­ture-length film on France’s most famous liv­ing philoso­pher. On the film’s accom­pa­ny­ing web­site, the directors–Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan–write:

Niet­zsche wrote that all phi­los­o­phy is a biog­ra­phy of the philoso­pher. The life of philoso­pher Alain Badiou sug­gests that the reverse of this is also true: from one’s life sto­ry, we might deduce an entire sys­tem of thought.

From his birth in Moroc­co, to the events of May 1968 in Paris, to his twi­light years as a nomadic pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, Badiou’s own biog­ra­phy is per­haps his most com­plex and thought-pro­vok­ing work. He is a man who demands to be con­sid­ered the ally of both Pla­to and Sartre, St. Paul and Lucifer, the math­e­mati­cian and the poet.

With inti­mate access, Gorav and Rohan Kalyan have pro­duced the first fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about Alain Badiou. By address­ing the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions in Badiou’s life and work through cin­e­mat­ic means, the film­mak­ers are con­front­ed by the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions of cin­e­ma itself: thought vs action, inte­ri­or­i­ty vs exte­ri­or­i­ty, pres­ence vs absence. And in order to bring to their com­plex sub­ject a sense of empa­thy, clar­i­ty, and cri­tique, they must ask a ques­tion as old as the medi­um: can cin­e­ma think?

Badiou has been made avail­able through Rohan Kalyan’s Vimeo page, and it will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Alain Badiou Per­forms a Scene From His Play, Ahmed The Philoso­pher (2011)

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)