quick day wrap

The conference was a great success.

Morning: Worms and During, both speaking in French. AUP. During spoke a great deal about Prince of Networks, which was the wonderful surprise of the day. Didn’t see it coming.

Afternoon: Rabouin, Maniglier, and I, all in English. Different AUP building, same one where I spoke in January.

Meillassoux was in attendance, which didn’t surprise me. Alain Badiou was also in attendance, which did. As always when meeting philosophers of that stature, without exception (this was my first meeting with Badiou, and even first time seeing him) he simply greets one warmly and sincerely and listens intently to all the papers all day long. No jerking around with petty little dominance games, as I encounter around 40 percent of the time at the next level down. DeLanda, Habermas, Latour, Rorty, Zizek, in correspondence and/or in person, all treated me as politely as possible, and you can now add Badiou to the list. I won’t name any of the badly behaved names on the blog, but my personal friends have heard the stories. It’s petty crap such as making you wait outside their office for 20 minutes, trying to look busy when it’s quite obviously an act of merely looking busy. The Badious of the world have no time for or interest in that sort of garbage.

Great Italian dinner afterward. Started grilling Meillassoux on some biographical details for the first chapter of the book.