‘From the Event to the Symptom: Badiou and Lacanian Ontology’. This article discusses the relation between the negative ontology in Lacan’s psychoanalysis and the event in Badiou’s philosophy, trying to shed light on the differences in the political context of the effort to go beyond capitalism. After a brief summary of the meaning of the negative in Lacan’s theory, the significance and power of the event in Badiou’s thought, and especially in his recent, more directly political, works, is analysed: on (...) this basis, the way in which Badiou reads Lacan and understands the subject is dealt with, and the limitations of this reading are pointed out. It is argued that, due to Badiou’s rejection of the intrinsic negativity of Lacan’s subject, there is a structural incompatibility between them. The idealistic component of Badiou’s thought is then tackled, with reference to the hidden Kantiansm (Žižek) and the Platonism present in his philosophy. In conclusion, a political critique of the ways in which Badiou’s event could work in the world is offered: the synchronic nature of the real and the symbolic – from which descends the ontological negativity of the event, that cannot therefore be defined through the use of “before” and “after” – is reaffirmed. (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)

Can politics be thought?, asks Alain Badiou in the title of a recent book. The question itself reveals an experienced lack: that of politics. A lack which the so-called “return of the subject,” far from resolving, would stigmatize. The “return of the subject,” as he asserts, is merely the counterface of the break of politics, its reduction to an “ethics of tolerance” from which all its properly political traces have previously been erased. If politics cannot be associated with the “return (...) of the subject,” this is because politics does not relate to any subject but rather to the very impossibility of conceiving of it. Thus, the attempt to reactivate politics becomes inextricably linked to the endeavor of rethinking, or better said, unthinking the subject. As this article shows, this project articulates a specially dynamic current of thought in the last years, which we may call, generically, “poststructuralist Marxist.” That project not only gave a new impulse to Marxist thinking, articulating a space of reflection which delimitates this current from that one with which it borders—deconstructionism—and from which it can interpellate the entire philosophical tradition. Ultimately, it comes to condense an issue whose relevance far exceeds the ambit of Marxist thinking: how politics is possible in a post-metaphysical and post-subjective context. Being and Event, by Alain Badiou, is, no doubt, the most systematical attempt to answer that question. It allows us to observe the main contributions of these current to contemporary philosophical thinkings, revealing, at the same time, the kind of aporias that that issue poses to it. (shrink)

The study discusses the political in Jean-Paul Sartre's work, focusing principally on the conceptual constructions through which the agent acting in a political action situation can be interpreted from the texts. Sartre's conception of the political agent is discussed against the background of the operational concepts and the limit-situation as an ideal type action situation construed as conceptual devices in the work for showing both Sartre's fashion of using and of construing concepts. In addition certain metaphors such as theater, play (...) and mask are used for highlighting the political reading of the texts. The theme of the agent, in one form or another, runs through Sartre's entire work. It is a theme which largely gathers together the different conceptual devices and different perspectives he takes in his work. In this study, through concepts and figures interpreted from the texts, especially from Critique de la raison dialectique, itis shown that Sartre's construction of the agent forms a challenging attempt of a revised view into the classical concept of subject. It is also shown that his agent is both a political and a moral actor which cannot be reduced to a subject or to a person, but can be described as an actor, as a player of the political condition, and as a user of political action strategies through the concepts of limit, change and non-identity. Sartre's central point of view of action is that of the agent acting in an interior space of action in a construed world. This forwards a view within which the perspective of production forms a framework for the argumentation where the main themes through which the portrait of the agent can be drawn are temporality, interiority, exteriority and subjectivity. The agent of the Critique as a non-identifiable actor acting in a temporally and dimensionally produced action situation is produced in the process of internalization and externalization of the historical and inherently political condition of being condemned to freedom. In the study it is shown that it is this agent through whom the political comes to the world and who is condemned also to politics. It is also shown that this agent forms a perspective of interpretation as well to Sartre's plays as to the central concepts of his morals. (shrink)

In seeking to found a ‘new political logic’, Badiou argues that we can only retrieve the political sense of concrete negation through its subordination to a prior field of affirmation: i.e. the opening of a new possibility inside a given historical situation, or ‘the event’, that may be politically realised through the creation of a ‘new subjective body’ consisting in the social affirmation of those new possibilities. Revolutionary politics is therefore said to rest on a synthesis of, on the one (...) hand, democracy in the sense of spontaneous mass-political irruption, and, on the other, a prescriptive elaboration of the ramifications of the event. The discussion then turns to the question of strategy – outside and against the politically moribund State-form – and his reconfiguration of political universality vis-à-vis the formulations of classical Marxism. Badiou counterposes capitalist ideology’s implicit anthropology of self-interested animals to his own of subjects embodied in a generic truth-procedure and its concomitant model of political rights, where what is ultimately at stake is ‘the complete transformation of the form of... difference, of the way the difference exists’ rather than a materialist dialectics of antagonistic contradiction. The interview concludes with Badiou clarifying his relationship to Lacanian psychoanalysis as an essential but by no means exhaustive conceptual armoury for understanding the relation between subject and event. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

The paper takes as the starting point a dense and notorious quote by Lacan where he takes up in a single gesture three concepts of ancient philosophy, tyche, clinamen and den. The contention is that all three aim at the status of the object, although by different means and in different philosophical contexts, and the paper tries to spell out some crucial points concerning each. Tyche, usually translated as chance and put into an opposition with automaton, requires a reading of (...) some passages of Aristotle’s Physics where Lacan took it from, and an account of the problem of repetition in psychoanalysis. Clinamen, the swerve, stemming from Epicure and Lucretius, requires a condensed reading of the tradition which took it up, from Cicero to Hegel, Marx, Deleuze and Badiou, pinpointing the dilemmas and contradictions of this tradition. Den, stemming from Democritus who coined this neologism, brings up an entity which is neither being nor nothing, neither one nor zero nor multiple. It is perhaps the best evocation, at the dawn of philosophy, of what Lacan would call object a, and it allows to sidestep the difficulties and the pitfalls presented by the other two notions. The paper tries to pin down the minimal requirement for the Lacanian theory with the irreducible and incommensurable (non)relation of ‘minus one’ and den. (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)

l presente artículo se propone explorar los procesos educativos a partir de la ontología y la teoría del sujeto de Alain Badiou. Para ello busca analizar las situaciones educativas ya no desde la figura del triángulo pedagógico, sino más bien partiendo de un encuentro de individuos con una doble caracterización: la “igualdad” y el “pensamiento”. De este modo, incorpora al análisis educativo experiencias alternativas a la educación institucionalizada, como el caso de Joseph Jacotot abordado por Jacques Rancière. Asimismo, el artículo (...) pretende caracterizar el concepto de “sujeto” en la educación, a partir de una disrupción de los criterios distributivos asociados a las experiencias alternativas y a las críticas rancierianas respecto de los principios fundantes de la educación moderna. This paper proposes to explore the educational process from the Alain Badiou ontology and theory of the subject. To do so, aims to analyze the educational situations not from the pedagogical triangle figure, but rather on the bases of a meeting of individuals with dual characterization: “equality” and “thinking”. Thereby, incorporates alternative experiences to institutionalized education to the educational analysis, as the case of Jacotot, and the Jacques Rancière’s appropriation of it. Also, the article aims to characterize the concept of “subject” in education, from a disruption of distributional criteria associated to the alternative experiences and the Rancière’s critiques of the founding principles of modern education. (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)