Alain Badiou Wants to Make Movie on Plato Starring Brad Pitt

French philosopher and translator of the latest edition of Plato’s Republic, Alain Badiou, wants to make a movie about Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates starring Brad Pitt and Sean Connery, with Meryl Streep in the role of “Mrs. Plato.”

In a recent article by Jean Perrier for Vanity Fair France, and translated by Critical Theory via way of Google, he writes:

Incredible but true: Alain Badiou wants to invade Hollywood! More precisely, the communist philosopher is writing the script for a film to its production by U.S. studios. Title:The Life of Plato. The cast: Brad Pitt Plato at different ages. For Mrs. Plato, Meryl Streep. And Socrates, the master of Plato, Sean Connery. Here the cast dreamed thinker of Being and Event. Quite honestly, at first, we thought it was a schoolboy joke post-situ diversion ultimate quest … But Alain Badiou, this is serious. He wants, in his own words, “bring Plato, emblem of universal wisdom in the contemporary temple commercial images, the propaganda machine of American life, the capital of the capitalist corruption Hollywood!

In a 2009 interview with The Philosopher’s Magazine, Badiou was “entirely serious” when he told Nina Power that he wanted to make a film on the life of Plato, with Pitt as the lead. The Perverse Egalitarianism blog also posted another interview with Badiou from the same year, in which he said that his “idea would be that Plato and Socrates are played by the same person. The movie will be the idea that Socrates is a retrospective creation of Plato, so inside the movie Socrates would be something like the old-young Plato. During the movie Plato finally becomes Socrates, something like that. But the script is not finished, so there are many possibilities!”

While Badiou may be in the early stages of writing a screenplay for “The Life of Plato,” as it is said to be called, it’s unclear whether Hollywood would want any involvement, seeing as how the French philosopher has ties to communism. Formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, the 76-year-old has written several novels, including The Communist Hypothesis. Should the film move into production, it will be interesting to see what Badiou had in mind when bringing the Greek philosophers to the big screen.