This article offers an engagement of the ethics of Badiou, one of the most significant representatives of contemporary continental philosophy, with the question of corporate social responsibility. First, this article displays an account of the complex ethical thinking of Badiou. Then, it seeks to show how Badiou's thought offers an important and distinctive critique of corporate social responsibility as ideology. Precisely, the two main features of the ideological discourse of corporate social responsibility are collaboration and depoliticisation. The Badiouan critique provides (...) a performative efficacy against the seductions of corporate social responsibility discourse within the framework of a universalist ethics. Therefore, a Badiouan analysis argues that an ethical life is incompatible with corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This essay considers the divergent efforts of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek to arrive at a postmetaphysical conception of ethics that would sidestep the pitfalls of traditional Western humanism yet still possess universal applicability. Butler approaches this task through her ethics of precarity, which posits vulnerability as a foundation for a generalizable ethics of relationality in the Levinasian vein. Badiou and Žižek, in turn, work from a more Lacanian perspective, attempting to leap directly from the singular to the (...) universal by bypassing the particular. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, I propose that posthumanist theory needs to reconsider its resistance to a priori norms, for such norms do not need to be metaphysically grounded to be ethically compelling and politically useful. (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)

In his published lectures Civilizations: Nostalgia and Utopia, Daya Krishna criticizes postmodern thought and especially the writings of Jacques Derrida. By outlining similarities between the two, I would claim that, indeed, it was Daya Krishna’s unexpected proximity to Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ project that triggered his scathing critique of the latter. Moreover, Daya Krishna’s response to Derrida reveals an ongoing inner conflict in his own thinking. On the one hand, he provides us with a harsh critique of Derrida the ‘postmodern’; on the (...) other hand, he concedes that the ‘modern’ notion of knowledge has been totally transformed, and the ‘deconstruction’ of its old formulations was the major catalyst that provoked and directed his own philosophical enterprise in the last years of his life, reformulating knowledges. Reconstructing in this way, the dialogue which never happened might prove beneficial, not only for understanding the distinctive works of its participants, but also for carrying their writings and us one step further towards a productive, ‘relevant’ philosophical discourse in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article aims to study the present-day disarray of radical social critique, as represented by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which lacks reliable mainstays in contemporary societies and therefore resorts to religion in order to justify the universality of its revolutionary project. Emphasizing the opposition between particularity and universality, both Badiou and Žižek reject religion as a cultural particularity, attempting at the same time to discover in religion the symbolic codifications of the universal experience of a radical social change. Precisely (...) this is the task of Alain Badiou’s book on Saint Paul, which focuses on religious events such as the Resurrection and religious concepts such as grace. However, as the article tries to point out, this recourse to religion is certainly not innocuous, insofar as the desired radicality of social critique implies dogmatism, traditionalism and a hidden appeal to violence. (shrink)

The academy is in a mess. The cultural theorist Bill Readings claimed that it is in ruins, while the political scientist Michael Oakeshott suggested that it has all but ceased to exist. At the very least, we might argue that the current financial squeeze has distorted the University into a shape that would be all but unrecognizable to Oakeshott and others writing in the 1950s and 1960s. I will begin this paper by tracing the development of the modern Enlightenment University (...) over the past 200 years from its roots in late 18th century Berlin to its current predicament. I will then turn my attention to the introduction during the 1990s of nursing education into the University, and examine the particular difficulties and tensions encountered at the interface between a professional practice and an academic discipline. Finally, I will propose philosophy as a way of dwelling in the ruins of the Enlightenment University and of reconciling the corporate demands of the University with the obligations of the nursing profession. (shrink)

Drawing on Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, our initial focus in this article will be on the role of institutions within societies of control, an analysis which brings Deleuze into the orbit of Ervin Goffman’s famous ethnographic work on total institutions. This cross-comparative analysis of Deleuze and Goffman will allow us to show how institutions of control function by sequencing ‘dividuals’ across institutional domains in a continual process of totalization. Inspired by James Williams’s recent work on the ‘process philosophy of (...) signs’, we then argue that a critique of totalizing institutions can be positively articulated as a process-oriented challenge to algorithmic technologies and as a counter-sequencing of institutional control. We conclude with some reflections on the emergent modes of resistance that challenge both institutional and technological control, and we will proffer criteria for assessing such practices in relation to the two-sided nature of critique they enact, both processual and counter-sequential. (shrink)