This article contributes to understanding the effect of complexity theory on the social sciences. It analyses the relationships between complex processes of self-organization and the environment or ecology in which these dynamics take place. Two factors are prioritized: the role of information in the formation of complex structure and the development of ‘landscapes’ or topologies of possibility. The authors argue for an ontology that founds both material and informational structures, and for a radical continuity between the general thermodynamics of emergent (...) complex orders, cognitive theory and the complex structures of human thought and culture. (shrink)

Le propos fondamental du livre d'Alain Badiou est d'établir que le noyau de toute philosophie compatible avec le marxisme est une théorie du sujet. Mais laquelle? Ni le sujet comme conscience (thèse de Sartre), ni l'hypothèse du sujet " naturel ", désirant ou substantiel, ne peuvent convenir. C'est du côté du sujet clivé tel que Lacan - notre Hegel - en fait théorie, qu'il faut chercher une issue. Alain Badiou trouve là de quoi refondre, non pas le thème, forclos, d'un (...) sujet de l'Histoire, mais celui des sujets politiques. L'opération ne se peut faire sans étendre le concept lacanien du sujet, lié dès l'abord à deux types d'effets: l'occupation d'une place vide d'un côté, l'excès sur cette place vide de l'autre. Instrument de cette distinction : le couple algèbre/topologie. Il en résulte que le réel, pensable - comme le fait Lacan - sous le concept algébrique de l'objet cause, doit également être reçu sous celui, topologique, de consistance: ontologie en partie double. Le cœur de la question est atteint quand entre en dialectique avec la notion lacanienne du manque, la catégorie nouvelle de destruction. Qu'on ne s'attende pas à ne trouver ici qu'une discussion de théories. Mallarmé y voisine abondamment avec Mao Tsé-toung, Hilderlin avec Hegel, et le théorème de Gödel avec la situation des ouvriers immigrés. (shrink)

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the philosophical (...) legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)