A review of "Being and Event", by A. Badiou, O. Feltham, New York: Continuum, 2005, ISBN 0826458319.

How to uphold a politics of universalism, egalitarianism and abstraction without being tarnished by the accusation of fanaticism? In order to open the space in which the question can be asked, Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism explores various instantiations of the trope of ‘fanaticism’ and other associated concepts. Challenging the reliance on simplification, decontextualisation and analogical thinking behind uses of those terms, the book shows how fanaticism as Other conversely engenders a mystified idea of the modern West as the negative of the (...) political and theoretical interdictions associated with them. (shrink)

The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his work that contests the valorization of sexuality and calls for an `end of (...) the monarchy of sex'. This possibility is linked to Foucault's controversial exploration of the concept of `spiritual politics' through his engagement with the Iranian revolution. Rather than regarding this as a regression into a reactionary religiosity, I argue that it forms an inquiry into new political possibilities of revolt. These possibilities contest what Alain Badiou has identified as the nihilism of contemporary capitalism, in which desire and sexuality are deployed to constrain the political imagination to a limited bodily `materialism'. Drawing on the work of the later Foucault, it becomes possible to develop this new politics around asceticism, which is not so much withdrawal from the world but the refusal of the mediations of identity through sexuality and the body. (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)

This essay explores Badiou's writings on art and inaesthetics. It reviews his notion of the artistic event, comments on his 15 theses on contemporary art and examines his notion of inaesthetics. What follows is then applied to art and its education in terms of his search for a ‘third position’ that would challenge the extremes of capitalist design innovation and Romantic idealism that in his summation define the contemporary landscape.

This paper explores the possibility for a means of bringing about novelty which does not rely on kairological philosophies based on an event. In contrast to both common sense and contemporary philosophical understandings of the term where for novelty to arise there must be some break in the repetition of the structure, this paper argues that it is possible for novelty to come about through small-scale experimentation. This is done by relying on the philosophical notion of ‘economy’ in order to (...) understand how we think about the world. In this regard, our thinking about the world depends upon acknowledging certain possibilities at the expense of others. History can then be seen as the distribution of emphasis which allows for these past possibilities and the future potentiality they may hold. Novelty, defined here as a rereading of history, is precisely the disruption of these possibilities and a challenge to the memory of the system. The conclusion to this paper argues that experimentation is an important means by which we can bring novelty into the world. (shrink)

This article discusses the philosophy of Alain Badiou from the perspective of a formulation that we believe represents it succinctly: the dialectic of formalization. The main thesis of the article is that Badiou’s doctrine of the four truth procedures can be understood as a doctrine of a dialectical realization of new and universal forms in the world. The dialectic of formalization announces a double procedure – an autonomous and creative procedure for the production of a new true form in the (...) world and a process of the formation of continuity in discontinuity. Moreover, the dialectic of formalization represents a connection between Badiou’s mature work and his early writings from the late 1960s. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s Badiou had not yet introduced the concepts of subject and truth in the sense that he understands them today, it is possible to support the thesis that there is an indisputable connection between Badiou’s early concept of formalization and his later concept of generic truth procedure. We will try to show that the dialectic of formalization designates the continuity between Badiou’s early and mature work. (shrink)

This paper begins from the context of virtue ethics theory as applied to business ethics. We note that the concept of a practice therein lacks the full richness of the Aristotelian concept of virtue. In essence, when applied to business in the virtue ethics literature, the practice loses its reflective quality. It becomes beholden to, and irredeemably interdependent with, the economic institution (i.e., the for-profit firm) that houses the practice. Furthermore, the conventional practice of virtue ethics lacks the self-reflective ability (...) to challenge and overcome this interdependence. As a solution to this problem, we suggest tapping into a relatively recent stream in the business ethics literature, namely the application of aesthetics. We integrate aesthetics into virtue ethics in the form of a reflective practice. This reflective practice can be defined as one which embraces the firm as pure phenomenon. It opens a space or clearing that enables business practitioners to reflect and act within a broadened perceptual and conceptual understanding of the ‘true’ nature and purpose of business. (shrink)

This paper draws on the work of Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger to construct a postructural theory of the firm. The ideal firm is conceived as a technology that facilitates a technology-free void/site of potential. For actors within this firm to be ethical requires their achievement of human subjecthood through aesthetic fidelity to the site-induced events. Heidegger’s concerns regarding the enframing effects of technology and his recognition of the truth-revealing qualities of art, are incorporated here into a theory of the (...) firm as an idealized, technology facilitated, aesthetic void-of-potential revealing. Authentic human being thus implies that firms-as-technology ‘get out of the way’. This theory of the firm is further revealed through Badiou’s concept of event-driven human flourishing. We embrace Badiou’s ‘ethics-of-truths’ in which fidelity to the trace of an event creates human subjecthood. We consider implications of our theory-of-the-firm for social media firms such as Alphabet and Facebook. (shrink)

This review essay explores Alain Badiou’s paradoxical attempt to give a philosophical account of the 20th century (in his text The Century ) which is not understood along the lines of history. As an example of Badiou’s project of ‘subtractive formalization’, The Century amounts to an essentially ahistorical treatment of a historical period.

Referring to Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Southern US fiction writer Flannery O’Connor expressed the effect of the revelations about the horrors of Nazi Germany as ‘haunting’. Taking this comment and her admiration of Arendt as a cue, this article rereads Flannery O’Connor’s fictional depiction of secular characters. Usually lauded or critiqued for her entanglement in ‘otherworldly’ concerns, here these concerns become comprehensible as much as political intervention as motivated by ‘religious’ belief. O’Connor’s frequently humorous use of her (...) fiction as a retort to the secular world was inflected by her reading of Eric Voegelin’s contemporary secularization thesis with its criticism of all ‘isms’. In this context, O’Connor’s admiration for Arendt becomes all the more intriguing (since Arendt’s interpretations of the human condition clashed with Voegelin’s), and allows one to stage a theoretical meeting in order to explore O’Connor’s depiction of the secular in relation to a speculative exploration of how Arendt might have responded to the fiction of O’Connor. Such a staging is accomplished here via a reading of O’Connor’s short story ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’ read against Arendt’s concerns, principally those expressed in The Human Condition. (shrink)