Alain Badiou, one of the most significant philosophers of our time, will reflect in his presentation on the question of humanity and the other and what it entails for liberty, equality and fraternity:

“I am not free unless I recognize the liberty of the other; such is the foundation of liberty. But otherness is also the foundation of fraternity, because we are one with the other just as each person is the other to another.
Fraternity is a means of recognizing otherness as part of one’s own identity. That’s what fraternity is: recognizing within our identity, and what we have in common, that otherness remains.
It’s also clearly the foundation of equality. I cannot think of anyone who is more of an other than I am myself, or who is less human than I am. Therefore, liberty, equality, and fraternity all support the notion that otherness is an immanent aspect of identity. ” Alain Badiou

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, among which Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.