This paper will use the concept of time-image discussed by Gille Deleuze in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 as a heuristic tool for thinking about the Internet films of the Islamic State. By consideri...

This special issue brings to a close a series of three issue of this journal that have sought to expand the philosophical vocabulary of those concerned with business ethics. Previous issues treated the work of Emmanuel Levinas (Business Ethics: A European Review 2007, 16:3) and Jacques Derrida (Business Ethics: A European Review 2010, 19:3), whereas this issue is organised around engagements with the work of Alain Badiou. The three issues together seek to show ways in which the idea of the (...) ethical, in all of its variety, poses grave challenges to the continued practice of capitalist business enterprise. The editorial introduction to this issue introduces the work of Alain Badiou, some of the specific challenges his thought poses for business and business ethics and the papers included in the special issue. (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 essay articulates a double helix at work in Badiou’s thought on politics as a condition of philosophy and philosophy as such by focusing on what Badiou calls “the Idea of communism” and we will call “the communism of the Idea.” The former refers to communism as an Idea par excellence, while the latter concerns the Idea as a philosophical communism. The first section of the essay unpacks the Idea of communism as a composite interaction of politics, history, and subjectivity (...) insofar as each of these elements cannot be taken in themselves. Contrary to post-ideology, Badiou condemns the claim that we should live without an ideological framework insofar as this asks us to live without an Idea. The second section will focus on the communism of the Idea as the result of Badiou’s broader philosophical project and its major Platonic gestures. Badiou’s broader concerns pertain to the commitment to live with an Idea as finite, infinite, and transfinite to the endpoint that philosophy itself is characterized to be destined for communism. The crux that anyone can become a serious philosopher if, to paraphrase Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, they gracefully lend themselves to the process of truths as their fundamental commitment. (shrink)