Dear Alain by Katy Bohinc
Katy Bohinc’s celebrated Dear Alain, love letters to the world-leading philosopher Alain Badiou. Includes Badiou’s initial response to the work.
Cover design by Cassandra Gillig. Interior design by Wayne Smith.
2014 • 222 pp.
ISBN 978-0-927920-11-7 paperback, $18
ISBN 978-0-927920-12-4 hardcover, $30
2,000 years ago poets were banished from the Republic by Plato. Were a poet and philosopher to meet in a bar today, what would the poet say after all these years?
The resulting epistolary poems — addressed to leading Western philosopher, Alain Badiou — are at once a metaphor for the relationship between poetry and philosophy, a musing on the possibility of love in the modern age, and a challenge to the authority and absolutism of Western male philosophical practice.
Dear Alain is both "a psycho-sexual Lacanian thriller," according to psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and an accredited representation of Badiou's work, using Badiou's four "conditions" on philosophy: love, politics, math and poetry. No matter how the work is framed, ultimately the story rests in "Katya's" agency, her self-liberation from the mirror, or prison, of his writing — with her own writing, something like a long, inquisatory, subtle sext message.