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 essay takes Badiou’s recently published book as an opportunity to discuss not only his complex approach to Wittgenstein but also his evolving critical stance in relation to various other movements in present-day philosophical thought. In particular it examines his distinction between ‘sophistics’ and ‘anti-philosophy’, as developed very largely through his series of encounters with Wittgenstein. Beyond that, I offer some brief remarks about the role of set-theoretical concepts in Badiou’s thinking and the vexed question of their bearing on his (...) other concerns. Finally – with an eye to certain CR-internal trends and debates – I focus on Badiou’s powerful critique of the religious or mystical dimension of Wittgenstein’s thought. (shrink)

This paper makes two claims. Firstly, it shows that thinking the truth of any particular concept (such as politics) is founded upon an instrumental logic that betrays the truth of a situation. Truth cannot be thought ‘of something’, for this would fall back into a theory of correspondence. Instead, truth is a function of thought. In order to make this move to a functional concept of truth, I outline Dewey’s criticism, and two important repercussions, of dogmatically instrumental philosophy. I then (...) show how Badiou’s philosophy is indeed guilty of instrumentalisation, but emphasise that his prioritisation of truth is nevertheless important to maintain. The second claim this paper makes is that the criticism of Deleuze’s conception of truth as circular is misplaced, as it is founded on the assumption that Deleuze conceptualises the truth of objects. Instead, I show that, for Deleuze, truth is not a property of an object but of its production. To reach this conclusion, I develop what I call Dewey’s account of pragmatic instrumentalisation (as opposed to the dogmatic instrumentalisation he criticises) into Deleuze’s conceptualisation of truth as the process of making sense of our precarious world. I conclude by making some provisional remarks that Deleuze’s pragmatic account of truth paves the way for an ethics that is not founded on truths it cannot explain (i.e. God or mathematics), but as an ongoing, subversive practice. (shrink)

In this article a reference to Jacques Lacan’s ‘capitalist discourse’ will help highlight the bio-political workings of neo-liberalism in times of austerity, detecting the transition from so-called ‘debt economy’ to an ‘economy of anxiety.’ An ‘il-liberal’ turn at the core of neoliberal discourses will be examined in particular, which pivots on an ‘astute’ intersecting between outbursts of renunciation; irreducible circularity of guilt and satisfaction; persistent attachment to forms of dissipative enjoyment; and a pervasive blackmail under the register of all-encompassing regulations (...) and evaluations — all of which elevates the production of success up to the point of a production and consumption of failure. (shrink)

This article pursues a topological reading of Milestones, one of the most influential books in the history of Islamism. Written by Muslim thinker Sayyid Qutb, the general interest in this crucial text has largely remained restricted to the fields of Islamic Studies and Security Studies. This article aims to make the case for assuming a philosophical standpoint, relocating its significance beyond the above-mentioned fields. A creative and topological reading of this text will allow the spatial complexity of Qutb’s eschatological vision (...) to be fully exposed, while also unpacking the way in which antagonistic relations have variously been articulated by this thinker. The underlying conviction is that such an examination can offer new perspectives from which to examine and develop current debates on political universalism and antagonism in the tradition of continental philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay it is argued that the educational philosophy of John Dewey gains in depth and importance by being related to his philosophy of nature, his metaphysics. The result is that any experiental process is situated inside an event, an existence, a thing, and I try to interpret this “thing” as schools or major cultural events such as the French revolution. This basic view is correlated to Dewey’s concept of transaction, of experience and finally, it is related to a (...) discussion of methods in education. (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)

In this article, I explore the way in which proximity and distance have been made relevant to cosmopolitanism and I discuss the significance contemporary theory attributes to border crossing. By employing colonial border crossing and its rationalization as an example, and by drawing from Alain Badiou's critique of political philosophy, I expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement. I argue that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversible, (...) raised at an early age, preserved through education and carried along wherever one goes. Then, I show how this thesis relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. By elaborating on Heraclitus's dictum that ‘the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city’, I sketch an account of patriotism that is (a) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism as well as (b) mindful of the duplicity of the interplay of proximity and distance. (shrink)

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the (...) emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts. (shrink)

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)

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)

How should we evaluate the global protests against the financial crisis from 2011 and onwards? Do demonstrations on central squares such as Syntagma, Puerta de Sol and Zucotti Park point towards alternative democratic models beyond representative democracy? This article identifies a schism between the protests as events and the protests as self-organisation. Whereas the protests as events remains the dominant interpretation of the protests – delivered with negative connotations by Ivan Krastev and with positive consequences by Slavoj Žizek and Alain (...) Badiou – this article will investigate the protests as self-organisation by emphasizing some of the many examples of autonomous political institution-building and creation of permanent structures of political participation, which have appeared as natural continuations of the protests. I argue that the protests as self-organisation can be seen as re-actualisations of the practices and ideals of council democracy as interpreted by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis. By interpreting the protests through the prism of council democracy, I argue that the manifold political and societal initiatives that have appeared in the wake of these protests attempt to realise a specific notion of democratic autonomy and political freedom. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

Nancy Fraser’s essay ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond’ is an important intervention in current discussions of Trumpism and how the left, broadly, should understand and respond to it. Fraser’s piece is an admirable effort to situate Trumpism in a broader and deeper political–economic context. At the same time, her argument suffers from a kind of reductionism and takes comfort from a questionable grand narrative of emancipation that is difficult any longer to take seriously. It thus warrants both (...) careful attention and serious criticism. My basic political point: Fraser’s version of ‘socialism or barbarism’ is unconvincing, and the adamant and principled defence of liberal democracy, and its further reform, ought to be a priority for left liberals and leftists more generally who are serious about countering right-wing populist authoritarianism. (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...

This essay is a response to the recent exchange between Paul Marshall and Timothy Rutzou on critical realism and integral theory in Journal of Critical Realism 11, in which integral theory was designated by Rutzou ‘a poisoned chalice’ for critical realism. It argues that, while integral theory could benefit greatly from the adoption of critical realist ontology, metacritique and the structural analysis of politics, critical realism could benefit even more from the scientific syntheses achieved by integral theory, especially developmental psychology, (...) cultural anthropology and transpersonal psychology. (shrink)

Badiou's philosophy of the ‘event’ has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou might call ‘the state of the situation’. After briefly outlining the manner in which Badiou's reinvigoration of the concept of ‘truth’ constitutes a serious challenge for (...) the politics of difference and the ethics of alterity, this paper explores the significance for educational philosophy of what, borrowing from Jacques Rancière, Badiou calls the ‘axiom of equality’, or the notion that, in democratic politics, ‘equality must be postulated not willed’. I suggest that this axiom is best understood when read in relation to Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and thus explore an intrinsic link between Badiou's more obscure philosophical claims and political assertions on the one hand, and the question of education on the other. I further propose that the limitations of Badiou's criticism of Rancière's work, which suggests that he stops short of locating an effective political subject who might oppose the parliamentary state, are revealed most explicitly when we reassess Rancière's approach to education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in his more recent work on political aesthetics. Ultimately, however, I conclude that a truly democratic approach to education will have to learn from both Badiou and Rancière, and take seriously the ‘axiom of equality’. (shrink)

Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader (...) popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles. (shrink)

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement (...) was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Alain Badiou, ethics can only arise in relation to an evental truth procedure that breaks from the economic logic of a situation. Further, because for Badiou there cannot be economic truths per se – rather, economic matters must be understood in their relation to one or more truths in the domain of love, art, science or politics – a Badiouian business ethics would look entirely distinct from any ethics that simply places limits on certain kinds of (...) economic activity. Although Slavoj Žižek, among others, has suggested that this marks an essential weakness in Badiou's economic/political theory, it may actually be the greatest strength of his position. Within a capitalist system, a Badiouian business ethics would then be a question of mobilizing economic resources in order to serve the ongoing construction of a truth procedure. For a business to be considered ethical on Badiou's terms, it must break – and continue to break – from the dominant logic of capitalism and its merely economic pursuit of profit maximization. (shrink)

This paper explores the plausibility of Alain Badiou's ahistorical theory of politics. By insisting that the events of egalitarian politics are radically subtracted from social and historical conditions Badiou imagines a form of political action that effectively comes out of nothing. However, in order to establish the very prospect of an event's occurrence Badiou is forced to ground the possibility of political intervention in his theory of "evental recurrence", which effectively enables the subjects of political action to draw on the (...) consequences of a preceding event in order to act in the here and now. The paper argues that by introducing the social dimensions of evental recurrence it is possible to construct an alternative account of political action that resolves a number of inconsistencies in Badiou's otherwise miraculous vision of politics. Consequently, rather than a militant activist that comes out of nowhere, evental recurrence implies that the militants of political action are saturated in their immediate social and political circumstances and in the memory of past struggles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The metaphor of ‘viral modernity’ denotes an era characterized by communal experiences of how viruses, be they in the shape of physical, virtual or symbolic forms, permeate and shape social and cultural life. To think educative justice in viral modernity thus require a radical move beyond the surfaces of conventional paradigms in order to reach at a deep-seated understanding of the phenomena of education and justice itself. Motivated by this ambition, I here present a Badiouan reading of educative justice (...) in relation to the aims and mission of philosophy of education. I start by briefly mapping out current educational philosophical paradigms and their ways of treating the issue of justice. Next, I contrast these orthodoxies to a Badiouan model. My overall ambition is to promote a philosophy of education that avoids philosophical doctrines, old and new, while simultaneously carrying a potential for unveiling the phenomenon of justice as educative truths-in-worlds. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBased on an overview of the ways in which politics and the political have been thought in critical discourse analysis, the author calls for a focus on the metapolitical dimension of discourse. The author develops his notion of metapolitics on the basis of post-foundational insights into politics, the political and processes of politicization. Metapolitics refers to projects and struggles where conflicting modes and models of politics clash. Metapolitical debates potentially reshape the structure of the public realm as well as the (...) entities, borders and processes that constitute it. The author differentiates his descriptive and analytic use of the term from the way this signifier has been used programmatically by the anti-democratic New Right and its heirs. He demonstrates that metapolitical projects can be democratic as well as anti-democratic. In order to facilitate discourse analyses of metapolitical projects, debates and struggles, the author suggests that the metapolitical dimension of contemporary debates can be explored further by integrating insights from governmentality studies, studies of political rationality and the discourse theoretical logics approach with CDA. Moreover, a further exploration of the linguistic and textual underpinnings of metapolitics constitutes a promising pathway for future investigation. The study of metapolitics should be part and parcel of the transdisciplinary domain of critical discourse studies so that our understanding of the linguistic and non-linguistic features of metapolitical projects can be developed in equal measure at multiple levels of abstraction. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Askegaard and Linnet’s : 381–404) call for a greater epistemological plurality within consumer culture theory. The article begins with a brief review of what these authors refer to as the dominant existential–phenomenological perspective and their Morinian alternative and then presents contemporary political philosophy as another alternative. Political philosophy has experienced quite a renaissance in recent years, and the school of thought has inspired major epistemological and ontological interventions throughout the academy. Here, I provide a (...) general introduction to this field of social inquiry and then focus specifically on the contributions of French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou’s work is particularly valuable for fields such as CCT, as it presents a unified epistemological framework for developing knowledge of social structures, cultural forms and subjectivities. The utility of political philosophy in general as well as the Badiouian framework is then demonstrated with recourse to the extant CCT literature. Ultimately, a Badiouian perspective has the potential to fulfil Askegaard and Linnet’s call for epistemologies that can attend to everyday experience while also considering the operation of cultural, political and sociological forces. (shrink)

In this essay I consider what is meant by the description ‘great’ philosophy and then offer some broadly applicable criteria by which to assess candidate thinkers or works. On the one hand are philosophers in whose case the epithet, even if contested, is not grossly misconceived or merely the product of doctrinal adherence on the part of those who apply it. On the other are those – however gifted, acute, or technically adroit – to whom its application is inappropriate because (...) their work cannot justifiably be held to rise to a level of creative-exploratory thought where the description would have any meaningful purchase. I develop this contrast with reference to Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘normal’ science, and also in light of J.L. Austin’s anecdotal remark – à propos Leibniz – that it was the mark of truly great thinkers to make great mistakes, or to risk falling into certain kinds of significant or consequential error. My essay goes on to put the case that great philosophy should be thought of as involving a constant readiness to venture and pursue speculative hypotheses beyond any limits typically imposed by a culture of ‘safe’, well-established, or academically sanctioned debate. At the same time – and just as crucially – it must be conceived as subject to the strictest, most demanding standards of formal assessment, i.e., with respect to basic requirements of logical rigour and conceptual precision. Focusing mainly on the work of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou I suggest that these criteria are more often met by philosophers in the broadly ‘continental’ rather than the mainstream ‘analytic’ line of descent. However – as should be clear – the very possibility of meeting them, and of their being jointly met by any one thinker, is itself sufficient indication that this is a false and pernicious dichotomy. (shrink)

Current critical pedagogical scholarship has theorized the epistemological and social intersection between globalization and educational technology according to two distinct positions. For some, this intersection offers new liberatory knowledges and opportunities that can subvert social homogenization and economic disparity. For others, this relationship is just another phase of neoimperialism that should be politically and ideologically resisted. In contrast, we argue that the intersection between globalization and educational technologies is rather a manifestation of larger economic and logical forces, and that resistance (...) to such circumstances can neither be purely ideological or social. Instead, we contend that such a theoretical and pedagogical foreclosure dialectically actualizes conditions for real change—particularly when it complicates educational research technologies and their impact on epistemological multiplicity. (shrink)

This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of (...) Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law, will take up. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s elaboration of a subject faithful to an event is commonly known today in the academic world and beyond. However, his first systematic account of the subject was already published in 1982 and did not mention the ‘event’ at all. Therefore, this article aims at tracing back both the structural and the historical conditions that directed Badiou’s elaboration of the subject in the early work up until the publication of L’Être et l’Événément in 1988. On the one hand, it (...) investigates to what extent the Badiouan subject can be considered an exceptional product of the formalist project of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse as instigated by psychoanalytical discourse and a certain Marxist discourse insofar as both were centered upon a theory of the subject. On the other hand, this article examines the radical political implications of this subject insofar as Badiou has directed his philosophical aims towards the political field as a direct consequence of the events of May ’68. (shrink)

In this paper we critically review recent developments in policies, practices and philosophies pertaining to the mediation between science and the public within the EU and the UK, focusing in particular on the current paradigm of Public Understanding of Science and Technology (PEST) which seeks to depart from the science information-transmission associated with previous paradigms, and enact a deliberative democracy model. We first outline the features of the current crisis in democracy and discuss deliberative democracy as a response to this (...) crisis. We then map out and critically review the broad outlines of recent policy developments in public-science mediation in the EU and UK contexts, focusing on the shift towards the deliberative-democratic model. We conclude with some critical thoughts on the complex interrelationships between democracy, equality, science and informal pedagogies in public-science mediations. We argue that science and democracy operate within distinct value-spheres that are not necessarily consonant with each other. We also problematize the now common dismissal of information-transmission of science as inimical to democratic engagement, and argue for a reassessment of the role and importance of informal science learning for the lay public, provided within the framework of a deliberative democracy that is not reducible to consensus building or the mere expression of opinions rooted in social and cultural givens. This, we argue, can be delivered by a model of PEST that is creative and experimental, with both educational and democratic functions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here read the Iranian film Hit the Road through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. In doing so, I hope to illuminate the triadic link between cinema, philosophy and paideia (ethical-political education). To explore, I adopt a philosophical methodology with the double ambition to reveal the latent pedagogies of the film and to acquire insights on the distinctiveness of a Badiouan conception of cinema. My questions are to what degree and in what ways cinematic experience can (...) be said to promote ethical-political formation. I start by portraying Badiou’s cinematic philosophy. Next, I expose how Hit the Road confronts us with a hidden real. Third, I close the paper by considering Badiou’s idea of cinema as an influential form of ethical-political education. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan concern for the whole world is often treated as oppositional to particular collectivities, to corresponding sensibilities and to the obligations that follow from them. Tensions revolve around demands made upon the self (depending on the emphasis on the local or the global) and infuse educational discourse accordingly. Culturalism approaches the self as a culturally or multiculturally shaped identity, monopolises the terrain of cosmopolitan debate and narrows the scope of cosmopolitan education only to encouraging hybridity of selfhood and to cultivating (...) respect and tolerance of global diversity. In this article, I discuss Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitan selfhood by drawing on the exemplary status attributed to specific manifestations of hybrid identity. What will gradually emerge from my discussion is, hopefully, a broadening of cosmopolitan demands upon the self and an emphasis on the transforming and reforming rather than the forming or informing significance of cosmopolitan education. This trans/re-forming significance is attached to a critical positioning of the subject regarding the ethico-political responsibilities of one’s home (-land, culture, commitments) that often go unnoticed. Doing one’s homework is shown to be a precondition for a cosmopolitanism understood within the order of treatment of, rather than agreement with, the Other. (shrink)