*This article attempts a Marxist critique of Alain Badiou’s positions. The importance of Badiou’s ontology as an affirmation of the possibility of radical-historical novelty is stressed, but also its limits. These limits have to do with Badiou’s abandonment of a dialectical-relational conception of social reality, his refusal of any causal connection between social reality, political decision and event, and the absence of a theory of ideology and hegemony in his work. Consequently, Badiou’s notion of a ‘subtractive’ politics cannot be considered (...) an answer to the open questions of communist strategy, despite his endorsement of the ‘communist hypothesis’. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of digital hermeneutics understood as the encounter between hermeneutics and digital technology, particularly the Internet. In the first part, I want to raise the attention of IT researchers and hermeneuticists to the theoretic and practical relevance of the encounter of their areas of research that are sometimes considered as incompatible to each other. There is still a lot of translation work to be done in order to get these two cultures (...) come closer to and profit from each other. The second part of the paper deals with the foundation of digital hermeneutics on what I call—following Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s paths—digital ontology as opposed to digital metaphysics. (shrink)

Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied with a desire to identify and implement a ‘cure’ that will either heal or eradicate the source of discomfort. In the political everyday such a ‘cure’ is disguised as a policy or a new law. Thus it comes as a little surprise that the term anxiety is increasingly used by politicians, policy-makers, legal and medical experts as well as scholars (...) to explain an allegedly new social phenomenon. Relying on psychoanalysis and critical theory the contributions in this special issue tackle modern anxieties in the realms of politics and law, and in particular look into how anxiety is manifested in relation to resistance, immigration, nationalism and austerity measures. This introduction firstly, unpacks the idea of anxiety conceptually and offers different ways in which anxiety can be read politically, legally as well as theoretically; and secondly introduces the arguments put forward in individual contributions. (shrink)