Associate Professor Alex Ling

Alex Ling is Associate Dean, Higher Degree Research and Honours, in the Faculty of Social Science, Arts, Business, Education and Law. He has published five books and more than thirty articles spanning film, philosophy, visual culture, and the politics of scandal. His work has been translated into French, Chinese, German, and Turkish. Alex is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Continental Philosophy and is available to supervise HDR projects in continental philosophy, screen media, visual culture, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary cultural politics.

Three principal strands of inquiry define my research: I am an internationally recognised film and philosophy scholar; a leading authority on the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou; and an innovative theorist on the subject of scandal. I have published 5 books (including one translated monograph) on topics spanning visual arts to mathematics, alongside 35+ peer-reviewed articles and non-traditional research outputs.

The quality and impact of my work has been recognised by awards (including the 2021 SoA Researcher of the Year), invitations, reviews, and media attention. My published research has been translated into French, Chinese, German, and Turkish.

My primary research interests span continental philosophy, film and television studies, visual culture, and psychoanalytic theory. My first book, Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)—adapted from my PhD thesis, which won the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Best Doctoral Thesis—offered the first sustained examination of Badiou’s philosophy of cinema, analysing how film both exemplifies and challenges his key concepts of truth, event, and subjectivity. My second monograph, Badiou Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (I. B. Tauris, 2016), provided a clear and accessible introduction to Badiou’s major ideas, reinterpreting them for practitioners and scholars in the creative arts. This work was translated into Chinese and published by Chongqing Press in 2021.  

In Scandalous Times: Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), I developed a new theoretical framework for understanding the function of scandal in contemporary cultural production, showing how states and institutions increasingly instrumentalise controversy as part of governance and public discourse. I also edited and translated (with A. J. Bartlett) Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), a landmark collection of Badiou’s early philosophical writings on set theory and category theory. This volume was republished in French by Éditions Hermann in 2024. My latest book, an edited and expanded edition In Search of the Lost Real, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.