The eminent French philosopher "dialecticizes" five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. In this unique essay, first delivered as a lecture during a panel discussion with the artist and philosopher Reza Negarestani, Alain Badiou identifies and "dialecticizes" five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's complex of matter and form is called to mind to describe the inner logic of a hard foam sculpture. A bronze statue with holes activates Plato's notion of participation of the concrete world in the "injured Idea of the Beautiful." A small metallic and incomplete "angel" engages Leibniz's affirmation that "everything that exists is composed of an infinity of things." Badiou's musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large- scale "red and blue monster" with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous "I think, therefore I am," with unexpected inversions and variations. Badiou refrains, of course, from claiming that Moulène thinks about any of these philosophers when making his specific works. What he