The article is devoted to the reasoning of the „Ereignis“ phenomenon in the philosophy of M. Heidegger. It is worth to emphasize that one of the main trends in contemporary philosophy is an attempt of creation of new–non-substantial–ontology. The very specificity of such ontology lies in the fact that classical substance is replaced by the dynamical configuration of sense, which is not “purely theoretical” but “ontological” in its core. “Ontological” means, in fact, that it is impossible to separate the mode (...) of Being of phenomena from the process of thinking about them. Heidegger’s philosophy was one of the first attempts to create such ontology. It is worth to point out the three steps of the Heidegger’s studies of Being. The first, “fundamental-ontological” step is characterized primarily through the “ontological difference” between Being and entity, when the phenomenon of time represents by itself their hidden basis. During the second, “radical-ontological” period, Heidegger has already carried out his famous “turn.” In compliance with this “turn,” the truth of Being, die Lichtung, substitutes time as the “pre-ontological” basement of Being. In this case, Being itself transforms into the Event, „Ereignis“. On the third, “post-ontological” stage of studies the focal point of Heidegger’s thought is “post-ontological difference” between the Being of entity and Being itself. On this stage both Being and time are rooted in the phenomenon of „Ereignis“. The latter has been now transformed from being a “simple Event” into a “matter of fact” as the alternation of the “disclosedness” and “concealness” of Being and time. In this case, „Ereignis“ is not quasi-substantial basement of Being, time or entity but it shows itself as its “Beginning” “), when the Truth of Being is replaced by the dynamical sense configuration of the event, i.e., a “matter of fact.” Thus, Heidegger has conceptually created a new type of thnon-substantial ontology, the core of which is the phenomenon of „Ereignis“ as the dynamical singular configuration of the temporal-ontological sense of the Event itself. (shrink)

This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Pippin and Žižek over the proper interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in relation to Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. Both Pippin and Žižek agree that Vertigo exemplifies Hegelian reconciliation: Scottie exhibits Hegel’s reconciliatory “negation of negation” when he realizes that his lost love Madeleine had really been Judy all along, thereby losing his original loss. Yet Pippin and Žižek disagree on the precise significance of the concept of reconciliation both for the film and for (...) the contemporary world. Žižek argues for a revolutionary reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must make a revolutionary break from the present world, in order to bring about a wholly new world. Pippin argues for a reformist reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must find the “traces of reason” latent in the present world, in order to gradually reform it for the better. Ultimately, I argue that Žižek’s reading offers the more authentically Hegelian approach to interpreting Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But if nothing else, the Pippin-Žižek debate demonstrates the profound intellectual fecundity of the intersections between film and philosophy for understanding our current historical moment. (shrink)

This essay pursues Gilbert Durand’s plea for a new anthropological spirit that would overcome the bureaucracy-or-madness dichotomy which has since Nietzsche left its imprint upon contemporary thought, forcing it to choose between an “Apollonian” ontology established upon some kind of first principle and a “Dionysian” ontology consisting in the erasure of any founding norm. It does so by reclaiming Dionysus and Apollo’s original twin-ness and dual affirmation in dialogue with contemporary anthropological theory, especially Roy Wagner’s thesis on the interplay of (...) “elicitation” and “containment” in sociocultural life. What would happen then, I ask, if we were to reimagine today’s philosophical game – which after Heidegger Deleuze, and Derrida turns variously and increasingly around subtraction – otherwise: as a chiastic board on which Apollo would cut Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus would in turn restore despite Apollo’s cuts, and on which the obliteration of any of the two gods would entail the inevitable dismemberment of the other? Accordingly, I offer a full reassessment of Dionysus’s and Apollo’s complementary roles in ancient-Greek culture in discussion not only with Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy but also with Ihab Hassan’s postmodern critique of Orpheus. All of it less with the purpose of putting forward a new metaphysics than with the intent of restating the translucent-ness that keeps together reality and thought against any claim that they are either transparent or opaque to one another. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of time and temporality in Homer. It argues that any exploration of narrative and time must, as its central tenet, take into account the irreducible plurality and interconnectedness of memory, the event, and experienced time. Drawing on notions of complexity, emergence, and stochastic behavior in science as well as phenomenological traditions in the discussion and analysis of time, temporality, and change, and offering extensive readings of Homer, of Homeric epithets and formulae, and of key passages (...) in the Iliad and Odyssey, the paper argues against chronological notions of linear time and progression and in favor of a complex, dynamic temporal “geometries” of Homeric temporality. The paper concludes by briefly extending the argument to the wider domain of ancient time in general. Homer is a fundamental point of reference in the ancient world. Thus, Homeric temporality—irreducibly complex—affects the cognition and perception of time throughout the whole of antiquity. (shrink)

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an (...) anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations. (shrink)

Buddhist schools of thought share two fundamental assumptions about language. On the one hand, language is identified with conceptual thinking, which according to the Buddhist doctrine separates us from the momentary and fleeting nature of reality. Language is comprised of generally applicable forms, which fuel the reificatory proclivity for clinging to the distorted – and ultimately fictious – belief in substantial existence. On the other hand, the distrust of language is mitigated by the doctrine of ineffability, which although asserts that (...) reality is beyond the scope of linguistic description, submits that philosophical analyses of key Buddhist concepts is a means of overcoming the limitations that language imposes on our experience and facilitating insight into the nature of reality. This paper provides an overview of Buddhist philosophy of language, with an emphasis on the dialectical view of language as indispensable but ultimately insufficient for contemplation. The Buddhist discussions of ineffability are explicated and compared with its treatment in modern Occidental thought, specifically the similarities and differences with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. (shrink)

We develop a new understanding of the historical horizon of event ontology. Within the general area of the philosophy of nature, event ontology is a still emerging field of investigation in search for the ultimate materialist ontology of the world. While event ontology itself will not be explicated in full mathematical details here, our focus is on its conceptual interrelation with the dominant current of Idealism in Western thought approached by us as a problem in the history of ideas. Our (...) presentation is designed to be accessible to a wider audience. We especially highlight the deep connection between event ontology and postmodernism in general, and the post-war French philosophers Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in particular, who are viewed as main sources for current and future programs of abstract materialism. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between materialism, dialectics, and theology in Alain Badiou's work. The first three sections of the article focus on Badiou's reading of Hegelian dialectics in his 1982 work, Theory of the Subject. The first section accounts for Badiou's splitting of Hegel into an idealist and materialist dialectic, and presents an exposition of the latter. The second section outlines Badiou's critical analysis of the theological model implicit in Hegel's dialectics. The third section investigates the core of this (...) criticism through a discussion of Badiou's reading of the “negation of the negation.” The remaining four sections examine the anti-dialectical interpretation of the Christ-event that Badiou presents in his book Saint Paul. Here the article illustrates how Badiou's insistence on separating the death of Christ from the resurrection is linked to his rejection of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and how this drives Badiou towards idealism. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

This paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why, but can also be understood as a structural question, concerned with the way we understand education’s directional impetus. We suggest that it is possible to understand education as something other than a curricular instrument designed to facilitate a purpose external to itself. We challenge such an instrumental view by arguing that (...) education is an emergent phenomenon with its own unique aesthetic qualities (like art or music); a phenomenon, moreover, that does not simply serve a purpose, but generates the purpose it serves. In this paper we lay down the groundwork for such a non-instrumental understanding of education by combining the notion of emergence with ideas from Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Aristotle’s teleological notion of the ‘ideal’ as self-generated and the Greek notion of ‘paideia.’ This provides an opportunity to theorise education’s directional impetus as the ongoing and open-ended coordination of three realms of human life: the symbolic, the individual and the political. Given the acute political and social dilemmas that instrumental understandings of education bring forth in multicultural, and so called ‘democratic’ and ‘inclusive’ societies, we hope that by opening the possibility to theorise education as a non-instrumental phenomenon, it may become possible to have more fruitful discussion regarding education than endless political debate about what the curricular ends of education should be. (shrink)

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...) he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Penelope Maddy has recently addressed the set-theoretic multiverse, and expressed reservations on its status and merits ([Maddy, 2017]). The purpose of the paper is to examine her concerns, by using the interpretative framework of set-theoretic naturalism. I first distinguish three main forms of 'multiversism', and then I proceed to analyse Maddy's concerns. Among other things, I take into account salient aspects of multiverse-related mathematics , in particular, research programmes in set theory for which the use of the multiverse seems to (...) be crucial, and show how one may provide responses to Maddy's concerns based on a careful analysis of 'multiverse practice'. (shrink)

This paper explores a new and post-structuralist discourse on the relationship between Lacan’s theory of mirror stage and the story of Narcissus as a mythological narrative. According to this discourse, subject is a construction posterior to the ‘I’. Lacan suggests that in the mirror stage 6-18 months old infants discern the I as something distinct from and outside of themselves for the first time through a reflective surface. An infant comprehends the image they see in this reflective surface as a (...) being independent of their mother and an object belonging to themselves, and they greatly admire this independent object as an ideal-I. That is, by discerning their own being through an image, the infant achieves a feeling of unity via this image and perceives their own being as an admirable unity. This feeling of I and unity, however, is doomed to decay as to become subject by means of the elements of Lacanian reality, namely language and the laws of society. Within the reality, Narcissus – exactly like in the Lacan’s theory of mirror – lost the confrontation of perceiving the image he admired in his reflection. The I of Narcissus, which he has been holding on as an image in this world, is drawn and demised whilst going beyond the water mirror so as to become a subject. In other words, the I that Narcissus admired in the reflection of the water underwent an unsurmountable deformation and he paid the price with his life. In this study, from the perspective of the Lacanian theory of subject it will be argued that the tragic split between imaginary and symbolic order represented by the death of Narcissus is not only a psychopathologic fact, but it is also a fundamental narrative about the construction of subject in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Designing education policy, curriculum and competences which promote and nourish the values and/or morals believed to underpin democratic culture is both contentious and something which has...

Ray Brassier's "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour. Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination (...) works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs. I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science. This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain. This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change. (shrink)

Revolutionary violence stems from the conatus of survival, from the appetite for life and joy rather than from the desire to destroy and the hubristic pretension to punish. It is an incursion of one's desire to affirm life and annihilate pain. Following Laruelle's methodology of nonstandard philosophy, I conclude that revolutionary violence is the product of an intensive expansion of life. Pure violence, conceived in non-philosophical terms, is a pre-lingual, presubjective force affected by the “lived,; analogous to Badiou's void and (...) it is radically revolutionary. It is fundamentally different from Benjamin's lawmaking “divine violence; and its appropriations by Žižek. Revolutionary experience is inevitably translated into language. What preserves the revolutionary substance in a post-revolution political discourse is that it is constantly checked by the sense of fidelity to the experience of the revolutionary event. Agamben, Benjamin, Schmidt and Žižek are discussed from an essentially non-philosophical stance, informed by Laruelle's theory that has been supplemented in some aspects by Badiou's concept of the pre-lingual event. (shrink)

Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating and self-reproducing (...) structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such. (shrink)

The formalism of mathematics has always inspired ontological theorization based on it. As is evident from his magnum opus Being and Event, Alain Badiou remains one of the most important contemporary contributors to this enterprise. His famous maxim—“mathematics is ontology” has its basis in the ingenuity that he has shown in capitalizing on Gödel’s and Cohen’s work in the field of set theory. Their work jointly establish the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the standard axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, (...) with Gödel’s result showing their consistency to the affirmative, while Cohen’s showing it to the negative. These results serve as the cornerstone of Badiou’s mathematical ontology. In it, drawing heavily on Cohen’s technically formidable method of forcing, Badiou makes the latter result the key to his defense of the possibility of a faithful tracing of the consequences in the ‘state’ of an ‘event’ by a ‘subject’. Whereas, Gödel’s result based on the assumption of constructability becomes the pivot for criticism of the general philosophical orientation that Badiou calls ‘constructivism’. Viewed from a position internal to mathematical formalism itself, and taking into account the twentieth century developments in the relevant field, Badiou’s stance seems to be neither appreciative of the actual course of such developments, nor just to the philosophical view point that was actually maintained by Gödel. In the present paper, this concern is intended to be substantiated through an exposition of certain facts pertaining to the said developments as well as to Gödel’s philosophical inclinations. (shrink)

In this article, we evaluate Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism in general and of Heidegger’s correlationism in particular. Contrary to earlier contributions, we argue that Meillassoux’s reflections on uncorrelated being not only serve an epistemological but also an ontological interest; both Meillassoux and Heidegger are interested in the way we have access to uncorrelated being as well as in the nature of uncorrelated being itself. After introducing Meillassoux’s criticism of the correlationism of Heidegger, we reflect on three arguments of his account (...) of planet earth as un-correlated being; the emergence of planet earth, the presupposed accessibility of un-correlated being and his criticism of Heidegger’s fideism. Although it becomes clear that Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism is not applicable in the case of Heidegger, it also helps us to articulate the relevance of Heidegger’s “realist” approach of uncorrelated being in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to test the degree to which Deleuze’s philosophy can be reconciled with the subject naturalist approach to pragmatism put forward by Macarthur and Price.

This essay discusses the role of being and ontology in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Starting from an examination of Alain Badiou's ontology and theory of the event, I discuss the possible opposition of being and the event in Deleuze's work. Though famous for his discussions of the univocity of being, Deleuze does discuss the event as that which is not being. Deleuze's theory of the event is similar to that of Badiou in that he considers the event to be (...) extra‐ontological. The essay closes by considering the differences between Deleuze and Badiou on the subject of the event. (shrink)

The purpose of this dialogue between an ‘empirical realist’ and a ‘traditional ontologist’ is to clarify and evaluate the presuppositions of the kind of anti-ontological position exemplified by empirical realism. After ontology is defined and the empirical realist's position explained, the traditional ontologist pursues a series of dialectical developments and criticisms of the empirical realist's claim to have a coherently non-ontological position. The eventual conclusion is that the empirical realist's opposition to ontology just arbitrarily assumes ontology to be associated with (...) infallibilism and incompatible with fallibilism instead of conveying the illegitimacy of ontology itself or convincingly explaining the non-ontological standing of their position. The significance of this dialogue for critical realism is that it extends the case against anti-ontological epistemologies in general and empirical realism in particular by demonstrating the problems that result f.. (shrink)

This paper discusses the repercussions of a new metaphysics—speculative/weird realism—for education and pedagogy. A historic shift is taking place in present-day continental philosophy, which involves an explicit and renewed call for realism. One of the most salient features of this development is a revitalised interest in ontological questions. As part of this overall trend towards realist and materialist ontologies in current continental thinking, the paper particularly focuses on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that aesthetics is first philosophy. Harman’s object-oriented (...) philosophy is an approach to metaphysics and ontology that is enamored by the experience of the vibrant yet inscrutable autonomous reality of objects. In order to come to terms with this new approach to reality, I suggest education be conceived as the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude understood as the ability to uphold the tension between relational and non-relational aspects of objects understood in the Harmanian idiom. (shrink)

Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is (...) recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One. (shrink)

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach (...) to mathematics and a top-down naturalisation. Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter. (shrink)

While any number of topics would serve to compare and contrast Deleuze and Badiou, this article will focus on the event. Focusing on the event serves several purposes. First, it provides a vantage point from which to elucidate a number of key topics in both philosophers. Second, while Badiou’s most recent work is already organized around his conception of the event, Deleuze’s discussion of the event is more diffuse. Thus, a discussion of the event in Deleuze will serve as heuristic (...) to relate several of Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Guattari’s) texts. Finally, focusing on a single issue will clarify what is at stake in each conception of the event. (shrink)

In 1967, after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, Ferdinand Alquiéé expressed concern during the question and answer session that perhaps Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that Alquiéé took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by agreeing with Alquiéé; moreover, he argued that his primary interest was precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze argues, is to (...) be done ‘‘in the style of Whitehead’’ rather than the style of Kant, and in developing this metaphysics Deleuze draws heavily on Spinoza. The present essay examines this Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead, the ‘‘metaphysics science needs’’, drawing on the writings of David Hume and Bruno Latour in the process. This discussion will in turn enable us to situate Deleuze's metaphysics in relation to contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and correlationism, and especially Quentin Meillassoux's critique of the latter. Our conclusion will be that the kind of metaphysics Deleuze pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforwardly realist, but rather charts a course between realism and anti-realism. (shrink)

Derrida's key concepts or pseudo-concepts of différance, the trace, and the undecidable suggest analogies to some of the most significant results of formal, symbolic logic and metalogic. As early as 1970, Derrida himself pointed out an analogy between his use of ‘undecidable’ and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate the existence, in any sufficiently complex and consistent system, of propositions which cannot be proven or disproven (i.e., decided) within that system itself. More recently, Graham Priest has interpreted différance as an instance (...) of the general metalogical procedure of diagonalisation. In this essay, I consider the extent to which Derrida's key terms and the essential operations of deconstruction can be formalised. I argue that, if formalisation is indeed the technique of writing par excellence, then the formalisation of deconstructive concepts tends to show how the auto-deconstruction of total systems arises from the problematic possibility of writing itself. For instance, since diagonalisation permits the ‘arithmetisation of syntax’ whereby a formal system is able to formulate claims about its own logico-grammatical properties, we can understand its potential to inscribe the undecidable within the systematicity of language as simply one instance of the potential of writing, in figuring itself, to render inscrutable the trace of its own origin. (shrink)

The essay distils from Badiou's writing a pedagogy based on his theories of knowledge and truth, as brought to bear on poetry and the arts. By following Badiou's implicit ontology of learning, which presupposes a dynamic and passionate engagement with a concrete situation, the essay argues that Badiou's view of modernity, in particular, contributes greatly to the educational topic, and offers an alternative teaching paradigm to the outmoded schools of criticism of the 20 th century. It also argues that the (...) concept of universalism in education, as against identitarian particularism, is further evinced from a discussion of Badiou's study of St. Paul. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works, Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of (...) the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one”. The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through. (shrink)

On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...) suggest that, even though the existence of horrendous evil does not resolve evidential ambiguity in favour of atheism, there are reasonable value commitments that would preclude those who hold them from satisfying extended Jamesian fideist conditions for committing themselves to classical theism. I then begin a discussion of a possible revisionary theistic alternative (in the Christian tradition) which – one might hope – may meet those conditions. An earlier, shorter, version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

The Politics of Orientation provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on (...) postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. The Politics of Orientation breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right. (shrink)

A perspective is provided on how to move beyond postmodernism while struggling to do philosophy in the twenty-first century. The ontological structures of time, history, and mathematics are analyzed from the vantagepoint of the Heideggerian theory of nonspatial Fold.

According to Alain Badiou, truth’s existence is not dependent upon philosophy because philosophy itself is not a creator of truth. Badiouan thought submits philosophy to the universe of truth through the mediation of truth procedures. Badiou names these procedures love, politics, art and science. In contrast, the instinctual reason of democratic materialism, which Badiou defines as the partnership between parliamentary democracy and neo-liberal pragmatism, replaces love with physical beauty, politics with technical power, art with a marketable talent and science with (...) a competitive genius. These replacements also correspond to post-truth. This article contrasts the concept of “disinterested interest” in Badiou’s truth procedures with “self-interest” reigning over democratic materialism’s reality procedures. Following Badiou, I explain how “self-interested interest” reproduces the human-animal’s instinctual reason, which triggers post-truth politics. Commitment to truth in a post-truth era therefore cannot be sustained by appealing to democratic materialism’s manipulated knowledge but must be guided by disinterested interest. The article argues that knowledge cannot be an antidote to post-truth because democratic materialism often uses knowledge as an instrument or sometimes as a control mechanism, to strengthen the position of post-truth in many circumstances. (shrink)

The book explores the themes of a) “radical concepts” in politics (inspired by François Laruelle’s “non-Marxism” and “non-philosophy,” developed in accordance with Badiouan and Žižekian “realism”); b) politically relevant and applicable epistemologies of “Thought’s Correlating with the Real” (Laruelle), inspired by Laruelle, Badiou and Žižek and c) the possibility of hybridization of the epistemic stance of “radical concept” with the politics of grief and “identification with the suffering itself” proposed by Judith Butler. Radical concepts, the political vision and the theory (...) based on them, are always already succumbing to the “Lived” (Laruelle), to the singularity of the Event (Badiou), to the encounter with the “kernel of the Real” (Žižek) conditioning a political horizon and the grand and small political narratives taking place within it. The thesis of the book is that the instances of the “lived,” the “event” or the “Real” can be inherently inter-connected by virtue of the category of the “experience” which is an instance of the sheer lived, the bare being subjected to an occurrence which is always already an instance of trauma. The mere subjection to certain” taking place,” the passion (in the etymological sense derived from the Latin verb pati or in the Spinozian sense) which is category beyond the psychological notions of feeling, rational (or irrational) thought, i.e., an ontological category referring to our relation with the “Out-There” which always already happens to us, is that to which the radical (political) concept succumbs to as the ultimate authority rather than to a doctrine, a system of thought, to the “philosophy’s auto-mirroring” (Laruelle). Political revolt or the revolutionary stance stems from precisely this bare experiential, the sheer lived and thus, from the Real of the conatus of staying-in-life. Paradoxically the survivalist stance, the principle of self-preservation is also the revolutionary stance which is by definition destabilizing and destructive. Bodily resistance to subjection (i.e., to discipline) and the continuity of the Self in-the-Real is the source of resistance. The Real of grief and mourning, the identification with the purely experiential stance of the suffering itself is the foundation of a “radical concept” of political solidarity, which by virtue of its being grounded in the Real, i.e., in the Lived, provides the possibility of acting in a revolutionary way. But it is also a form of human universality or political universality, which yet again is not historic universality but rather purely categorical. Other concepts that can be called radical, concepts which are minimally transcendental (Laruelle) and are, therefore, of revolutionary potential are also violence, mourning, labor (work) and gender (the trauma introduced by the linguistic determination as a “he” or a “she”), life, death, animal. Yet, the main focus of the book is the exploration of the lived of vulnerability, trauma and the conatus of life as the determination in the last instance of the revolutionary (political) stance. Clearly, the revolutions and the revolutionary stance this book advocates, or rather, whose potentiality it explores, are not necessarily historical revolutions produced by the intentionality to create politico-historic change. They are not this necessarily. Yet again they are such possibly. Still all purely (on the formal level) revolutionary stance tends to introduce universal change, radically change the political horizon and to reverse the politically unthinkable into a thinkable by elevating it to the level of a universal political truth. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 699-703.

This article sets the agenda for a new materialist humanism through a critique and analysis of theories of materialist subjectivity in recent French philosophy. I begin with a critique of the lack of a properly internal account of the human subject in the work of Alain Badiou, arguing that his disavowal of any sort of humanism and a dismissal of the natural sciences leaves him without a way to conceptualize the internal activity of the human subject. I then consider the (...) neurological account of human subjectivity offered in Catherine Malabou's recent materialist articulation of human consciousness and consider how this internal theory of human subjectivity can supplement the wholly external account offered by Badiou. I conclude the article with a consideration of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism to show the manner in which at the ontological level he offers a materialist account of human thought as contingently emerging from wholly material processes. Building upon this, I point towards the possibility of a non-hierarchical form of materialist humanism that is wholly immanent in its affirmation of the unique capacities of human thought and activity without claiming any special metaphysical significance for human beings. (shrink)

This article argues that the standard model of political representation mischaracterises the structure of representation. After surveying the classical types of representation and their application to non-humans, the basic nature of representation is shown to have been unduly centred on interests, responsiveness and unidirectional protocols. It proposes a different structure by drawing inspiration from recent scholarship and developments in political philosophy, as well as the representation of non-human actors. It proposes an ontological grounding of representation in ‘irreducible multiplicity’, and a (...) structural analysis based on the concepts of claim and relation. This abstract form of representation can take into account both human and non-human cases, and works to ground different typologies. The relational structure of representation creates interests and preferences, subjects and actors, power dynamics and seemingly immutable identities. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of analysis of the social relation called ‘capital’ in his work can also be (...) investigated by means of a detour into the economic writings of theUnion des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste, the political organisation in which Badiou played a leading rôle throughout the 1970s in particular. By excavating this theoretical work of the 1970s, we can identify more precisely the historical and political reasons behind Badiou’s ambiguous relation to Marx and specifically to Marx’s systematic grasp of the logic of capital. This excavation will consequently lead us to a reflection on the limits and openings in Badiou’s thought for the Marxian critique of political economy. (shrink)

Politics today seems to be marked either by fear or conciliation. The idea of a radical break with the present has, for many, been removed from the agenda. What tie together the thought of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou is a commitment to politics as offering the possibility of a break with the present. This paper examines their common thought, as well as what divides them, from the perspective of a renewal of the political project of resistance.

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some (...) unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

An important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of “hyperbolic reading”, (...) and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy. (shrink)

Extant literature romanticizes frugality as a lifestyle trait that helps in the spiritual evolution of consumers, which in turn enables them in overcoming the negative consequences of materialism and over-consumption. Extant studies have not paid attention to cultural contexts, such as caste and gender, which could outline the non-volitional enactment of frugality in societies such as India. We draw from the work of the political philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that frugality embodies non-volitional subjectivities and is linked to processes of (...) responsibilization and de-politicization. We engage with layered narratives from three story-sites and conceptualize frugality as a socio-political subjectivity that disenfranchises consumers and normalizes inequality. Our study provides evidence of how consumers are made to adopt frugality to conform to political conservatism and unequal orders of caste and gender. (shrink)