French Literature Reviews - 2026

Alain Badiou, What Does the Poem Think?
Poetry and Poetics

What Does the Poem Think?

Alain Badiou

Éditions Nous

Antiphilosophy Series

176 p. — 20 € — ISBN: 978-2-37084-034-9

Bringing together theoretical essays on poetry and specific readings of poets (Pasolini, Hopkins, Stevens, Pessoa, Mallarmé...), this book is the first that Alain Badiou has dedicated to poetry. Poetry occupies a central place in Alain Badiou's intellectual journey and body of work. Along with politics, science, and love, art is designated as a "truth procedure." Yet, among the arts, it is poetry that Alain Badiou has most frequently invoked in his thought.

For this is indeed about thinking the poem, and thinking what the poem thinks. The poem has always disconcerted philosophy. The latter has been—from Plato to Heidegger and beyond—in constant dialogue and rivalry with poetry. Alain Badiou, notably through his diagnostic proposition of the "age of the poets," revisits this quarrel, which seems to be the very essence of their relationship.

In this book, he also explores another relationship: that between poetry and politics. The poem is a thought that is its very own act—this is what Alain Badiou's praise of poetry invites us to contemplate.

This collection gathers theoretical essays on poetry and specific readings of poets such as Pasolini, Hopkins, Stevens, Pessoa, and Mallarmé. It examines the longstanding intellectual engagement between literature and philosophical inquiry, a traditional dynamic that has persisted from classical antiquity through modern thought. Readers interested in modern aesthetics, continental philosophy, and the intersections between literature and politics may find this volume relevant.