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Manifesto for Philosophy

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... In contrast to a tentative covering of the distance, Badiou points to the fruitful gap between philosophy and real life. To him, it is exactly this distance that conditions and justifies philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2006(Badiou , 2011a. On the one hand, Badiou holds that "philosophy is not worth an hour's effort if it is not based on the idea that the true life is present" (Badiou 2009b, p. 14). ...
... If we read Badiou's Ethics in light of his two manifestos for philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2011a it becomes evident that the problem for Badiou is that philosophy seems to pretend both to be a science and an ideology. This fluctuation between two types of discourses is due to the fact that philosophy -at least within the French tradition of historical epistemologies -has been seen as a discursive construct; or rather a double discursive construct that can never escape the discourse it aims to throw light on. ...
... Arguing against those who tend to conflate politics with philosophy and also truth with knowledge, Badiou (2006Badiou ( , 2011a contends that there is no such thing as a philosophical truth. The purpose of philosophy is not to develop a credo. ...
Chapter
The TV-series “Here and Now” (HBO 2018) may be seen as an allegory of the current situation within philosophy of education. The main character is the depressed philosopher Greg Boatwright, father of four: three adopted children - from Liberia, Vietnam and Colombia - and a biological daughter, who calls herself “the boring white chick in the family”. Raising this family was to Greg and his wife a “great progressive experiment in diversity”. However, on his 60th birthday he delivers a disturbingly pessimistic speech: “It all failed”. Later he confides to his daughter: “sometimes I feel like the world’s falling apart”. Admittedly, today’s philosophy of education may fall short of such a bleak description. Nevertheless, in face of such a situation it seems pertinent to re-think philosophy of education, old and new. The aim of this chapter is to explore to what degree Alain Badiou’s anti-philosophy may represent a way of doing so. In the first part of this chapter I map out the many faces of current philosophies of education. Next, I perform a close reading of Alain Badiou’s “ethics of truths” and “logic of worlds”. In doing so, I hope to reveal the ontological assumptions that generate Badiou’s philosophical position. In the third part of the chapter I compare and contrast Badiou’s position with some contemporary philosophies of education. Referring to Greg’s pessimistic speech we may ask: Did they all fail?
... In contrast to a tentative covering of the distance, Badiou points to the fruitful gap between philosophy and real life. To him, it is exactly this distance that conditions and justifies philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2006(Badiou , 2011a. On the one hand, Badiou holds that "philosophy is not worth an hour's effort if it is not based on the idea that the true life is present" (Badiou 2009b, p. 14). ...
... If we read Badiou's Ethics in light of his two manifestos for philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2011a it becomes evident that the problem for Badiou is that philosophy seems to pretend both to be a science and an ideology. This fluctuation between two types of discourses is due to the fact that philosophy -at least within the French tradition of historical epistemologies -has been seen as a discursive construct; or rather a double discursive construct that can never escape the discourse it aims to throw light on. ...
... Arguing against those who tend to conflate politics with philosophy and also truth with knowledge, Badiou (2006Badiou ( , 2011a contends that there is no such thing as a philosophical truth. The purpose of philosophy is not to develop a credo. ...
Book
This book offers a variety of outlooks and perspectives on the constitutive values and formative norms of a society, reflected by discourses on ethical-political education. It also discusses conceptual and critical philosophical works combined with empirical studies. The book is divided into three parts: the first part describes contemporary youth’s tangible experience of and reflections on ethical-political issues, while the second part explores the potential powers and pitfalls of educational philosophies, old and new. The third part highlights cutting edge issues within the humanities and social sciences, and examines the prospects of a fruitful rethinking of ethical-political education in response to today’s pressing issues. By addressing current dilemmas with diligence and insight, the authors offer solid arguments for new theoretical and practical directions to promote philosophical clarification and advance research. Intended for students, teachers and researchers, the book provides fresh perspectives on the many facets of ethical-political education, and as such is a valuable contribution to educational research and debate.
... In contrast to a tentative covering of the distance, Badiou points to the fruitful gap between philosophy and real life. To him, it is exactly this distance that conditions and justifies philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2006(Badiou , 2011a. On the one hand, Badiou holds that "philosophy is not worth an hour's effort if it is not based on the idea that the true life is present" (Badiou 2009b, p. 14). ...
... If we read Badiou's Ethics in light of his two manifestos for philosophy (Badiou 1992(Badiou , 2001(Badiou , 2011a it becomes evident that the problem for Badiou is that philosophy seems to pretend both to be a science and an ideology. This fluctuation between two types of discourses is due to the fact that philosophy -at least within the French tradition of historical epistemologies -has been seen as a discursive construct; or rather a double discursive construct that can never escape the discourse it aims to throw light on. ...
... Arguing against those who tend to conflate politics with philosophy and also truth with knowledge, Badiou (2006Badiou ( , 2011a contends that there is no such thing as a philosophical truth. The purpose of philosophy is not to develop a credo. ...
Chapter
Young Europeans, including Nordic youths, now grow up in a globalized world marked by visible economic and social inequalities, new patterns of migration, digitized imaginaries, and an uncertain future. Youth revolts, emerging fascism and a “democratic recession” (Fukuyama 2015) may indicate that the societies’ social contract is put to test. In this situation, national and transnational policy-makers tend to portray ethical-political education as a remedy. But is it necessarily so? This volume offers a variety of outlooks and perspectives on this question. Educational researchers and philosophers of education from Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm are here mixing conceptual and critical philosophical works with empirical studies as they systematically address current dilemmas with diligence and insight. In doing so, they challenge ethical, ontological and epistemic assumptions beyond contemporary models: What may be the potential prospects and pitfalls of traditional and novel approaches to ethical-political education today?
... Elsewhere in Being and Event, Badiou calls this gap between the elements of a situation and all the derivable subsets "the point in which the impasse of being resides"; and in Manifesto for Philosophy he refers to this "wandering of the excess" as the Lacanian "real of being" (Being and Event, 83). 17 It is especially important to emphasize that for Badiou, Cantor's set theory represents the "radical desacralization" of eternity, yet it is a desacralization that brings with it strange consequences. 18 On the one hand, set theory replaces religious and Romantic notions of infinity with an account that is logically exacting and mathematically precise; on the other hand, it produces anomalies that are often counterintuitive and difficult to accept. ...
... Given a chapter with approximately 1,610 lines (to be exact, there are 1,609 lines in "Penelope") the number of combinatorial possibilities may be expressed by the number of variant readings within any ten-line unit (in this case five) raised to the power of the total number of ten-line units (in this case 161), or five to the power of 161, which in standard mathematical notation is approximately 3.4 x 10 112 . To give the reader some idea of the magnitude we are dealing with, the age of the universe measured in seconds-not years but seconds-is approximately 4.1 x 10 17 . That means that the number of variant readings for "Penelope" is roughly ten billion 10 times larger than the number of seconds the universe has existed (the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old). ...
... Alain Badiou, for example, refers to capitalism as the desacralization of the social bond, as the conditions and ideas of collective belonging are stripped bare and quantified. 21 This thought, however, gets its strongest reformulation in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Pre-capitalist economic relations are defined by codes that are necessarily extra-economic, qualified and subjectified in bodies and memories (AO 247, 263). ...
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Spinoza’s formulation from 1670 is perhaps most well-known by its citation in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia over three hundred years later.2 As Deleuze and Guattari write, “That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’” (AO 29).3 Deleuze and Guattari’s citation simultaneously reduces the passage to the fundamental problem, that is, fighting for servitude, and adds another reference, that of Reich, albeit parenthetically. Reich does not cite Spinoza in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, at least according to the letter, but he does refer to the spirit of his analysis in insisting that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism” (ibid.). As Deleuze and Guattari add, paraphrasing Reich, “the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and those who are exploited are not continually out on strike” (AO 38).4 The reference to Reich functions to not only shift the question from seventeenth-century superstition to twentieth-century fascism, but also from politics to the critique of political economy, from obedience to a despot to exploitation by the capitalist system. What connects the two texts—despite the gulf of centuries and the shift of focus from political obedience to economic exploitation—is the insistence on the fundamentally active nature of subjection. Subjection is not passively endured: it is not a product of fear or constraint but is actively sought, a product of desire.
... In mathematical set theory, as used by Badiou (1999Badiou ( , 2005, elements with a certain arbitrarily selected characteristic are brought together. Let us here focus on the element U as in a U(nique being), but whose characteristics are the behaviours inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity; and when brought together, they constitute the subset B as in B(ehaviour). ...
Chapter
Psychiatric/neurodevelopmental diagnoses have expanded in number and scale with increased influence over matters of education and upbringing. One of the most common psychiatric diagnoses among children and adolescents is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The dominant perspective of ADHD is biomedical, where ADHD is defined as a neurogenetic dysfunction and disorder of the brain. Due to the absence of biological markers, the diagnosis is legitimized on the basis of a humanitarian principle: as an ideology. Through the diagnosis, which is construed in the article as a form of onto-epistemological violence, the unique subject is forced into an object and a second-class citizen who undergoes instrumental techniques of behaviour modification. The overall leitmotif of the article is to shift the focus from ‘chemical imbalances’ to ‘power imbalances’ to counteract reductionism, disempowerment and medical behaviourism. Theoretically, the article draws upon the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s ontological examination of being qua being, wherein the aim is to critically examine the onto-epistemological violence following the diagnosis of ADHD and to seek out a less violent pedagogy.
... These disciplines are considered as broadly embedded in the Marxist framework and postmodern approaches (Eagleton 2003). Alain Badiou explored whether feminist philosophy raised any serious challenge to the anti-philosophy in theory (Badiou 1999). On the other hand, Frederic Jameson categorized the new subjects of history in the post-1960s such as women and Blacks that challenged the class approach. ...
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Women’s and gender studies in the twenty-first century have transformed the question of theory and praxis across the globe. As a discipline, it is waging its struggle against diverse forms of power and patriarchy. Women’s studies in India started its own unique trajectory from the 1970s onwards. However, Dalit feminism critiqued the metanarrative of Indian feminism in the 1990s. Dalit feminists argued that they are oppressed on the basis of caste, class and gender. Dalit feminism subverted the internal and external patriarchy through its own powerful methodology and tropes. It debunked the partial, Brahminic, Indian feminism and its conspicuous silence on the relations of caste, gender, class and patriarchy. Dominant feminists included Dalit feminist discourse in the curriculum in a patronising fashion. Paradoxically, the social composition of those academicians was confined to the upper caste/class locations. This article engages with the experiences of Dalit women academicians who teach in the department of women’s and gender studies in India. It explores forms and practices of caste, class, and gender discrimination in such departments. These forms of domination and subordination show the contradiction between practice and theory. It reflects on the moral and ethical positioning to unpack the everyday caste violence that operates in the educational institutions. It maps the politics of women’s and gender studies in India. This article analyses the possibilities and impossibilities related to Dalit feminist engagement with capabilities and intersectional approaches in women’s and gender studies in India. The main thrust is to examine the real and utopian dimensions of the assertions of Dalit women academicians.
... To Bringhurst's mind, this happens "because mind and language are trying to answer to the poetry of the real" (199). In this regard, French philosopher Alain Badiou (1999) has convincingly argued that philosophy, science, art, and politics are indeed forms of producing new truths. Poetry is no exception. ...
Article
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This article explores poet Mark Strand’s facet as an art critic and, more specifically, the way in which the pictorial universe of American painter Edward Hopper influenced his own poetry, both thematically and stylistically. Reading Hopper’s well-known oil on canvas House by the Railroad (1925) in a New York Times article entitled “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” published on 17 October 1971, Strand dwells on “Hopper’s fascination with passage” (340). Years later, he would expand his critical exegesis of House by the Railroad and other canvasses by the American painter in a book-length essay titled Hopper (1994) in ways that are expressive of his own poetics. Both Strand and Hopper look at the world with an inquisitive gaze and capture moments in time with utter clarity to show that the self is a mystery and humans are transients yearning for a moment of revelation, a momentary stay against confusion.
... To Bringhurst's mind, this happens "because mind and language are trying to answer to the poetry of the real" (199). In this regard, French philosopher Alain Badiou (1999) has convincingly argued that philosophy, science, art, and politics are indeed forms of producing new truths. Poetry is no exception. ...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores poet Mark Strand’s facet as an art critic and, more specifically, the way in which the pictorial universe of American painter Edward Hopper influenced his own poetry, both thematically and stylistically. Reading Hopper’s well-known oil on canvas House by the Railroad (1925) in a New York Times article entitled “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” published on 17 October 1971, Strand dwells on “Hopper’s fascination with passage” (340). Years later, he would expand his critical exegesis of House by the Railroad and other canvasses by the American painter in a book-length essay titled Hopper (1994) in ways that are expressive of his own poetics. Both Strand and Hopper look at the world with an inquisitive gaze and capture moments in time with utter clarity to show that the self is a mystery and humans are transients yearning for a moment of revelation, a momentary stay against confusion.
... (Badiou 2004a, 168) While the decision for the identity of the discourses of being and mathematics -it should be emphasized that the decision asserts the identity of those two discourses, not between mathematical objectivity and being simpliciter -is a decision for which no justification can be offered except retroactively through the demonstration of its productive consequences for thought, the decision may be seen as invoking what might be described in Heideggerian terms as an epochal disclosure of being. That is to say, the Badiouian decision is compelled by the recognition that modern mathematics has enabled the categories of being, universality, truth, and subject to be rethought, and it is the task of philosophy to register the possibility opened by mathematics -a task that has a certain historical urgency for Badiou, who sees that the Platonist categories of truth, universality, and absolute have been denigrated to the detriment of thinking, from both within and without philosophy (Badiou 1999). ...
Article
The innovation of Alain Badiou’s theory of change, which has attracted a great amount of attention from scholars working in disciplines across humanities, social sciences, and art over the past two decades, cannot be appreciated independently of the account of situations prior to an event’s irruption, namely, the order of being that is conceived using modern set theory in his treatise on general ontology. Retracing the meticulous systematicity with which pre-evental situations are conceived in Being and Event, this paper offers a reconstruction of Badiou’s general ontology that points toward the potential therein for articulating an account of structures and situations that may be qualified as social.
... As explained by Žižek, suture for Miller designates the relationship between the signifying structure and the subject of the signifier ( [48], p. 31), which one could interpret as the relationship between a symbolic, social system, and a person/subject in the system. Alain Badiou [2], who is influenced by Lacan, used the concept to explain how philosophy is becoming sutured to its conditions of truth, namely politics, science, love, and art. The main point is that philosophy, according to Badiou, has become too stitched to its different domains, and needs to de-suture itself and maintain independence while still being related to the domains. ...
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Intercultural information ethics (IIE), a field which draws on the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information and communication technology, has been argued to lack an adequate theoretical understanding of culture. In this paper, we take a non-essentialist view of culture as a point of departure and discuss not what culture is, but what we (both in our everyday lives, and as researchers) do when we use the concept of culture. To do so, we look for inspiration in the concept of suture, a concept which means the thread which stitches, or the act of stitching, a wound, but has had a long and intricate journey within psychoanalysis and film studies concerning the issue of identification. Three understandings of the use of culture emerge: suture as cultural misidentification, the evil in the cultural suture, and multiple, repeated cultural sutures. We use these categories to diagnose the use of culture in IIE and beyond, and suggest that the use of culture as multiple, repeated sutures—in other words, a recognition that we constantly fail in describing culture or cultural differences, and that each suture is coloured by its conditions of production, and that we cannot but suture with culture anyway—might be a way forward for cross-cultural research.
... 3 Philosophy was ultimately then to think the 'compossibility' of its enabling conditions, so as to not be sutured with any particular one of them. 4 Twenty years later Badiou published a second manifesto. 5 Here he came to think that philosophy is not at an end, but that it is everywhere, fallaciously ubiquitous in its assimilation to capitalism. ...
... • Primero, es una "hipótesis", por lo que no contiene ningún principio de verdad derivado mecánicamente de la posición en la estructura económica del portador de dicha ideología, pero está abierta a un "procedimiento de verdad" (utilizando la noción de Badiou [1980]). • Tiene un carácter "educativo"; es decir, está estrictamente vinculada con la transformación de esos sujetos que afecta, y es "energética", pues actúa como un estímulo a la acción transformadora. ...
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La ideología como concepto y como instrumento del debate político es utilizada en el país por diversos actores, especialmente en el ámbito de los intereses partidarios y de grupo. Su utilización, sin embargo, no siempre es transparente, y en muchos casos tiene un carácter superficial o manipulador. En el marco de esta situación, este trabajo se propone intervenir en la discusión sobre el concepto de ideología tomando como referencia teórica los escritos de Antonio Gramsci y tratando de seguir el curso del desarrollo analítico que realiza el autor para desentrañar su significación. Se argumenta que el enfoque que Gramsci elabora sobre ideología proporciona a la teoría social un instrumento teórico de inmensa utilidad para su estudio. Por consiguiente, esta intervención tiene como propósito aclarar los usos del término y resaltar su importancia en la vida política nacional. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 72, No. 751, 2017: 445-461.
... Conversely, truth--the philosophical category--is the subtracted universal articulation of these singular thoughts. In an essay-The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself- Badiou (1992) stated: ...
Article
The French philosopher Alain Badiou (1937-) is one of the most significant philosophers of our time, well known for his meticulous work on rethinking, renewing, and thereby strengthening philosophy as an academic discipline. In short, his philosophy seeks to reveal and make sense of the potential of radical innovations in, or transformations of, any given situation. Although he has not written extensively on education, the pedagogical theme is vital, constitutive, and ongoing throughout his work. Badiou is an outspoken critic of the analytic and postmodern schools of thought, as he strongly promotes the virtue of curiosity, and prospects of "an education by truths." "Truths" are not to be confused with matters of knowledge or opinion. Truths are existential, ongoing, and open-ended ontological operations that do not belong to any epistemic category. An education by such truths operates through a subtraction from the state of the situation and proposes a different direction regarding the true life. According to Badiou, the task of philosophy is to think these truths as processes that emerge from and pursue gradually transformations of particular situations. Overall, the structure of Badiou's philosophical system demonstrates an extraordinary ontological style as it concurrently stands in relation to, and breaks off from, the history of contemporary French philosophy, German Idealism, and Greek antiquity. His system, which is of vast complexity, is based on mathematical set theory, consisting of a series of determinate negations of the history of philosophy, and also created by the histories of what Badiou terms philosophy's conditions: science, art, politics, and love.
Article
The article examines the concept of utopia in its post-Marxist context. Since the 1970s—against the backdrop of the failures of May 68, the self-exposures of the USSR, and the decline of the workers’ movement, as well as in accordance with the immanent history of the logic of the history of philosophy itself—the concept of utopia has been running through new areas of meaning and is extremely dialectical in two modes: temporal and ontological. The first transforms utopia from never-being into “past”, the second provides two inversions, considering it as 1) a dystopia, the other of utopia, which is declared to be the hidden truth of utopia; and — when it is fundamentally possible according to its own concept — 2) as impossible, in connection with which utopia and its concept return to the discourse as a kind of empty place around which modern pessimism circles, correctly believing that the future is unimaginable. The time of ends, from the end of the grand narratives of disappointed radicals (Lyotard) to the end of politics (see Rancière’s analysis), is, however, picked up by Marcuse, who suggests considering utopia as ahistorical. The author introduces this strange ahistorical or even anti-historicalism as historical, relying on the conceptualized phenomenon of the desynchronization of the “base” (the development of productive forces to the degree necessary for social revolution) and the “superstructure”, which runs into a limit, since it cannot represent the restrained base, which has broken out of the formational “scientific” logic. When Marcuse writes that a utopia in the strict sense can now be called a project that violates the laws of nature, he means the “impossible” into which utopia turns after the catastrophes of the 20th century, betraying the truth of its concept contained in the simple possibility of another world. More than 50 years after “The End of Utopia” and almost 30 years after the ontological turn in philosophy, we can say that utopia is still unimaginable — in the strict sense is what violates the laws of logic. This thesis opens up the possibilities of a new dialectic and its alliance with transcendentalism, which the author considers as a critique of plastic reason in the spirit of Malabou, constructing time and time again the assumptions-concepts that it needs and which are “practically necessary” according to Kant.
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The emergence of the new is a question that has always been of extreme importance for social philosophy. In order to grasp it in its unity, we should look at it in a state of disruption. In this article I will try to demonstrate through a comparison of the ontological concepts of Ernst Bloch and Alain Badiou what two such different ways of producing the new as utopia and event have in common. In the philosophies of Bloch and Badiou it is easy to find many common features: the questions of the subject, of the ontological immanentization of the transcendent, of the opposition between communism and fascism, of rupture and unity. But despite all the similarities there is also a significant difference, which runs through the question of their ontological appeal to the new. Through the comparison of important aspects of the systems of the two authors, the structure that allows us to talk about the commonality of their project without elimination of differences will be revealed.
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A native of the Canadian West Coast, Tim Bowling is widely acclaimed as one of the best living Canadian authors. A Book Lover’s Journey (2010) explores how a single object —a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s Ideas of Order that he finds in a university library— can render the past visible and tangible in its pure materiality. On the front flyleaf of Stevens’s book, Bowling finds the elegant handwritten name of its previous owner, Weldon Kees, an obscure American poet who apparently took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Finding this signed copy of Stevens’s masterpiece is just the beginning of Bowling’s lyrical meditation on books as art objects, on suicide, the relationships between fathers and daughters, the history of printing and bibliophilia, while pursuing an archaeology of the American literary past with an astounding level of artistry and lyrical intensity.
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By engaging with the work of modern and contemporary philosophers and writers, in particular G. W. Leibniz, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Marcel Proust, Rok Benčin proposes a new understanding of these worlds as overlapping transcendental frameworks consisting of fictional structures that frame ontological multiplicity. Examining political conflicts and aesthetic interferences that exist between divergent worlds today, he reconsiders the way political and artistic practices reconfigure contemporary experiences of worldliness.
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This essay articulates a double helix at work in Badiou’s thought on politics as a condition of philosophy and philosophy as such by focusing on what Badiou calls “the Idea of communism” and we will call “the communism of the Idea.” The former refers to communism as an Idea par excellence, while the latter concerns the Idea as a philosophical communism. The first section of the essay unpacks the Idea of communism as a composite interaction of politics, history, and subjectivity insofar as each of these elements cannot be taken in themselves. Contrary to post-ideology, Badiou condemns the claim that we should live without an ideological framework insofar as this asks us to live without an Idea. The second section will focus on the communism of the Idea as the result of Badiou’s broader philosophical project and its major Platonic gestures. Badiou’s broader concerns pertain to the commitment to live with an Idea as finite, infinite, and transfinite to the endpoint that philosophy itself is characterized to be destined for communism. The crux that anyone can become a serious philosopher if, to paraphrase Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, they gracefully lend themselves to the process of truths as their fundamental commitment.
Chapter
Starting out in Sound Design and Music Production, a creative career that continues to this day alongside research and consultancy projects, I have been a senior leader in a post-16 Further and Higher Education provider for over 20 years now, having begun the education side of my work-life teaching Sound and Music Technology at degree level. My EdD thesis explored private enterprise in FE and provided an opportunity to become familiar with the philosophy of Alain Badiou. I have recently completed a chapter in a book celebrating the work of contemporary theatre company Bodies in Flight, having taken on the role of sound designer on three of their shows in the 1990s.
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For some years now, the significance of truth for politics has been intensely debated under the buzzword “post-truth.” However, this cannot hide the fact that political theory and philosophy have systematically neglected the relationship between truth and politics throughout their history. This article intends to remedy this desideratum by differentiating the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political field. To this end, the main strands of the post-truth debate are reconstructed and their shortcomings are pointed out. Second, based on a contrasting reading of Habermas and Foucault, possible starting points for systematizing the relationship between truth and politics are discussed. Third, and as a prolegomenon to such a systematization, the article proposes a cartography of political truth forms and relations along five fault lines: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secret and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice.
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This article explores the theme of nihilism from the perspective of post-continental philosophy by focusing on semiotics and information theory and the question of “meaning” at stake between them. Nihilism is characterised here as an avatar of the counter-Enlightenment tradition. Post-continental philosophy is defined by a positive revaluation of reason, science, and technology, which were critiqued for their nihilistic effects by key continental philosophers. Rather than critiquing nihilism, then, post-continental philosophers have tended to affirm it. This article argues that, despite appearances, such developments in fact allow a deepened response to nihilism, considered as an existential problem. It does so by using Lyotard’s critique of semiotics to show how the kind of linguistic and cultural meaning associated with continental philosophy is itself a kind of nihilism. It then examines Meillassoux’s theory of the meaningless sign and Laruelle’s idea of the secret truth of Hermes to argue that this new paradigm of post-continental philosophy allows a response to nihilism by offering an alternative to semiotic meaning. Thus freed, this new paradigm allows the embrace of information theory as a plural articulation of meanings grounded in meaningless data, which enables a superior response to nihilism in the information age.
Thesis
This thesis analyses a corpus of twenty-first-century British speculative plays in light of utopian studies and deconstruction. My goal is to examine the way contemporary speculative theatre engages with aporia as a mode of utopian thinking and to elucidate the implications of this ‘aporia turn’ on the question of theatre’s social and political commitment. I begin my main analysis with a study of speculative theatre’s mythopoeia, taking into account both specific narratives and the general form of mythical speech. My examination reveals the strategies adopted by speculative theatre to reconfigure and repoliticise myth by resisting its binary logic. This denaturalisation of mythical speech is crucial for the imagination of a radically different form of living-together, which is the focus of the next chapter. Instead of a community based on shared values and similarities, many plays call for a mode of non-hierarchical relationality sustained by nonidentity thinking and resistance against a monologic approach to language. In the last chapter, I will elucidate the dramaturgical strategies employed to generate an aporetic experience that points towards the possibility of a quasi-community of singularities envisioned in the previous chapter. By staging the contemporary Gothic sensibility and the entanglement of space, time, and responsibility, these plays engage the implicated spectator in a rehearsal for change and resistance. I would argue that the space of utopian speculation opened up by contemporary British speculative theatre, permeated with uncertainty and the impossible, is of great political and ethical relevance.
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For most readers, myself included, the views and opinions on the Russian attack and consequent war in Ukraine are dependent on the main media houses, who present the situation in a certain language. In this article, Badiou’s understanding of democratic materialism (languages and bodies) will be explored within the context of the war, and how language is used to order bodies into categories of good and evil. In democratic materialism, there are only bodies and languages, but no truth. The question that will be explored in these few pages is, is there a way beyond democratic materialism via truth towards a materialist dialectic?
Preprint
Abstract: Several months into this reversal to a Marcos rule that we thought we have defeated and foresworn, we are yet to grapple with the slaughters and plunders of the past Duterte administration. But this worrying and feared political regime is precisely enabled by the disastrous Duterte government. To understand this Marcos regime then, we must clarify the meaning of Duterte’s rule with finality and demonstrate its place in the cycle of violence and corruption that is our politics. And so we must ask, what was the meaning of Duterte? To ask this is to set aside the referent and think of the name as sign. In this paper, we are interested in Duterte as a coherent shared understanding and Duterte as a practical efficiency. As such, we examine two corresponding meanings for Duterte. First, Duterte was the name for the ideological deployment of middle-class fantasy—as both the bearer and the obscene means of our lost agency. And second, Duterte was the name for the continued experience of normalized emergency—of state terror and militarized pandemic response. Keywords: Duterte, ideology, middle-class fantasy, state terror, normalized emergency, pandemic
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This final chapter of the book takes a form slightly different to the other chapters, foregrounding Brooke-Rose’s final struggle with questions of mortality, memory, and friendship. Textually, it uses her two autobiographies (which she called “anti-biographies”), Remake and Life, End Of, to negotiate her complex thinking about death and its impact upon life and living. Earlier moments, like the furore at Vincennes and her time at Bletchley Park, are shown to have been reflected imperfectly in these writings, the hand of the legal censor removing much that was considered libellous or officially secret. Her lifelong companionship with the writers Eva Hesse and Mary de Rachewiltz, and their shared love of Ezra Pound’s work, is also looked at. Brooke-Rose’s intuition, that death both gives value to life and subsequently renders it meaningless, is measured against her double sense of internal and external truths.
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This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demonstrate that a Lacanian theorization of ‘the political’ can help to open up a space for articulating the current deadlock that locks the Left in a state of melancholy, anxiety, depression, and/or impotent acting out. After a brief conceptual introduction to the notion of ‘the political’, the paper mobilizes and develops the Lacanian theory of the subject. This permits opening up the terrain of psychoanalyisis to the question of the political as that what does not work in the world. The key insights of a Lacanian-inflected political theory are then explored through the work of some of the key critical political theorists: Jacques Rancière, Slavoz Žižek, and Alain Badiou.
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Intimate strangers – episodes with my father Vincenzo Di Nicola 1,2,3 1 MPhil, MD, PhD, FRCPC, DFAPA, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada 2 Chief of Child Psychiatry, Montreal University Institute of Mental Health, Montreal, QC, Canada 3 Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Corresponding author: Vincenzo Di Nicola E-mail: vincenzodinicola@gmail.com Abstract In this memoir told in four episodes, the author, an Italian child psychiatrist and family psychotherapist who lives in Canada, revisits his episodic encounters with his father from their first meeting to his father’s death. The first episode recalls how he met his Italian father for the first time in Brazil as an adult. He wrote a memoir about that emotional encounter entitled, “Strangers No More,”(1) published in Italian and several other languages, then integrated as the concluding chapter of his book on cultural family therapy, A Stranger in the Family.(2) After some 20 years of sporadic father-son and family encounters, the author revisits his relationship with his father and his Brazilian family following his father’s death in the second episode. Deferred and episodic on one hand, provocative and profound on the other, the third episode describes the enigma of his father’s life with the metaphor of “The Third Bank of the River,”(3) after a classic Brazilian short story. Towards the end of his life, with a final, startling revelation about the mysteries of his absence, his father allows the author to recognize retrospectively that they have been familiar but unknown to each other. In the fourth episode, this series of episodic yet profound encounters with the man who became an intimate stranger is understood as nothing less than an event in the author’s life, opening possibilities, transforming everything. The memoir closes with a coda of reflections for therapists on slow thought and evental therapy that has no other object than itself.(4) Keywords: family memoir, father-son relationships, intimate strangers, predicament, threshold therapy, event, slow thought, evental therapy. Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the editor, Prof. Doina Cosman, for her introduction to my memoir, a previous version of which appeared online in Aeon Magazine.(5) Versions of this memoir were also published in Italian(6,7) and Portuguese.(8) References 1. Di Nicola V. Non più estranei: Un terapeuta familiare incontra suo padre. Terapia Familiare, 1995; 49, 75-89. [Strangers no more: a family therapist meets his father] 2. Di Nicola V. A stranger in the family: culture, families, and therapy. Foreword by M Andolfi, MD. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. 3. Guimarães Rosa J. The third bank of the river and other stories. Trans. and with an introduction by B Shelby. New York, Alfred Knopf, 1968. 4. Di Nicola V. Take your time: seven pillars of a slow thought manifesto. Aeon. February 27, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto 5. Di Nicola V. Intimate strangers – there is no dark fate or bright destiny, only things that happen. Aeon. April 13, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/there-is-no-dark-fate-or-bright-destiny-only-things-that-happen 6. Di Nicola V. Intimi sconosciuti: episodici passaggi con mio padre. Terapia Familiare, Terapia Familiare, Marzo 2017; N. 113, 87-98. [Intimate strangers: episodic passages with my father] 7. Di Nicola V. Intimi sconosciuti: episodici passaggi con mio padre. In: Andolfi M, & D’Élia A (eds). Alla ricerca del padre in famiglia e in terapia. Milan, Franco Angeli, 2017, p. 88-97. [Intimate strangers: episodic passages with my father, in: In search of the father in the family and in therapy] 8. Di Nicola V. Estranhos íntimos: Episódios com meu pai. Revista Brasileira de Terapia Familiar, agosto 2018; 7(1), 65-77. [Intimate strangers: Episodes with my father]
Chapter
Because poetry necessarily contains subject‐positions or identities, and because its formation is a political matter, all poetry is necessarily political. Responses to the necessarily political nature of poetry have informed the ways in which modern British and Irish poets have tried to be political in their work. Rather than impose strict taxonomies or schools, we identify several distinct but interwoven strands of political poetry, using illustrative poems where those strands are particularly active. These include: the poetry of the everyday, which aspires to address a public about current affairs; poetry claiming (and problematizing) a voice from a marginalized subject‐position; poetry seeking formally to resist authority and closure; poetry seeking to bear witness to atrocity and to register its own complicity with it; poetry influenced by Hegelian and Marxist dialectics; poetry chasing utopian impulses; and poetry dealing with the lives of poets and/or political activists. As a frame for this analysis, the chapter draws on the ideas of Alain Badiou in order to position poetry in relation to political truth.
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This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end.
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Chapter Seven digs deeper into theory to consider further how the mathematical/human interface depends on the mutual dependency of how we understand mathematical objects and of how we understand human subjects. The apprehension of mathematical objects is examined through sessions with student teachers researching and critically analysing their own spatial awareness from a pedagogical point of view. The chapter is guided by the theoretical work of Alain Badiou whose philosophical model develops a Lacanian conception of human subjectivity and defines a new conception of objectivity. In this model, the conception of subjectivity comprises a refusal to allow humans to settle on certain self-images that have fuelled psychology and set the ways in which humans are seen to apprehend the mathematically defined world. The assertion of an object, meanwhile, is associated with finding a place for it in a supposed world, where the object may reconfigure that world in its very assertion. The composite model understands learning as shared participation in renewal where there is a mutual dependency between the growth of human subjects and of mathematical objects. Renewal is referenced to a diversity of ever shifting discursive parameters that enable learning through negotiating the spaces within which we operate and the objects those spaces allow. Learning to teach then comprises developing sensitivity towards the discursive spaces that allow others to build objects. The chapter again provides examples from my own teacher education activities centred in addressing these concerns. Preview: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030550998
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It is easy to feel small, powerless, and unable to spark any sort of change. Being only one person among billions can seem overwhelming indeed. So much is completely beyond our control. There are only a limited set of decisions that people are able to make in life, generally speaking. Given the circumstances, however, there are even fewer decisions that folks will be able to make from here. Of the choices that remain, one involves whether or not we choose to engage in a shared and collaborative practice—of whether or not we are committed to the people in our lives, to the people on this planet, and to the other forms of life on Earth. As such, this is a book about survival in the face of mass extinctions, including those of the academic type. This is a book about ethical research practices, about simple truths, about the commitments we initially made to this work, and about how we might better support each other along the way. Most importantly, this is a book about finding and making our own communities. Communities do not belong to any one person or small group of people. Rather, communities—genuine, real, and vibrant communities—belong to us all. This is a book about how.
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Intimate strangers – Episodes with my father. (In English with a bilingual English-Romanian Abstract & Introduction by D Cozman) Psihiatru.ro, 2020, XVI (61): 42-47. Abstract In this memoir told in four episodes, the author, an Italian child psychiatrist and family psychotherapist who lives in Canada, revisits his episodic encounters with his father from their first meeting to his father’s death. The first episode recalls how he met his Italian father for the first time in Brazil as an adult. He wrote a memoir about that emotional encounter, entitled “Strangers No More” (1), published in Italian and several other languages, then integrated as the concluding chapter of his book on cultural family therapy, A Stranger in the Family (2). After some 20 years of sporadic father-son and family encounters, the author revisits his relationship with his father and his Brazilian family, following his father’s death in the second episode. Deferred and episodic on one hand, provocative and profound on the other hand, the third episode describes the enigma of his father’s life with the metaphor of “the third bank of the river” (3), after a classic Brazilian short story. Towards the end of his life, with a final, startling revelation about the mysteries of his absence, his father allows the author to recognize retrospectively that they have been familiar but unknown to each other. In the fourth episode, this series of episodic yet profound encounters with the man who became an intimate stranger is understood as nothing less than an event in the author’s life, opening possibilities and transforming everything. The memoir closes with a coda of reflections for therapists on slow thought and evental therapy that has no other object than itself (4). Keywords: family memoir, father-son relationships, intimate strangers, predicament, threshold therapy, event, slow thought, evental therapy
Article
This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.
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