Dear Alain by Katy Bohinc (digital edition)
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.
2014 • 222 pp
"She's terrific, and I don't even think very often about Alain Badiou—I'm just enjoying her exclamations, and her explanations of how poetry, for her, embodies intuition and provides evidence for embodied experience. It's a very good book and I'm going to quote it at people."
—Stephen Burt
"Surely, certainly, amusingly, thoroughly, this book is the perfectly unfaithful book in its loving address to that collapsed beast, philosophy. Between its slick covers, Katy gambols. She defies the parameters of the epistolary mini-drama her letters to Alain Badiou act out: a park, a platonic table, a parallelogram that meets at the horizon. 'How do you not wonder if the canon has made a mistake' she asks. The sheer vitality of her quest shows us that philosophy depends on being dead a little bit."
—Lisa Robertson
“This book should be banished!"
—Slavoj Žižek