To address the theological turn in phenomenology, this paper sets out critical arguments opposing the theist phenomenology of Michel Henry and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the event. Henry’s phenomenology has been overlooked in recent commentaries compared with, for example, Jean-Luc Marion’s work. It will be shown here that Henry’s philosophy presents a detailed novel turn in phenomenology structured according to critical moves against positions developed from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This demonstration is done through a strong contrast with Deleuze and (...) a short engagement with Quentin Meillassoux. The paper presents an argument against the theological turn on the grounds that it misunderstands the form of affectivity when compared to Deleuze’s work on affect and event. It will be argued that Henry’s search for a free-standing affect deduced as a condition for any appearance underplays the way any affect is included in many causal and transcendentally determined series such that any notion of the pure affect independent of other processes is a fiction. The loss of this pure affect entails the questioning of the theological turn in Henry. (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)

En este artículo abordaremos la cuestión de los ‘puntos de vista’ desde la propuesta filosófica de Alain Badiou. Para ello, recurriremos especialmente a L’être et l’événement y a los últimos seminarios, destinados a elaborar el material para L’Immanence des vérités, y centraremos el interés en las orientaciones de pensamiento constructivista y genérica. De tal modo que asociaremos el constructivismo a la noción de ‘puntos de vista’ y ensayaremos una especie de alternativa a partir de los postulados de Badiou sobre la (...) orientación genérica. In this paper we will address the question of ‘points of view’ from the philosophical proposal of Alain Badiou. In order to do this, we will especially resort to L’être et l’événement and to the last seminars, aimed at elaborating the material for L’Immanence des vérités, and we will focus on constructivist and generic orientations of thought. In such a way that we will associate constructivism with the notion of ‘points of view’ and we will try to propose an alternative based on Badiou’s generic orientation postulates. (shrink)

This essay argues that important critical and political perspective can be gained on Deleuze's famous essay, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ by viewing it as an attempt to move beyond the Sartrean framework of ‘bad faith’. The argument comprises four sections. In section one, I contextualise Deleuze's essay in terms of contrasting readings of Bartleby, from a prior account by Georges Perec, to contemporary accounts indebted to Deleuze, from Hardt and Negri's Empire to Gisèle Berkman's recent L'Effet Bartleby. The argument of (...) this section is that a problematically reductive image of Bartleby has emerged in the wake of Deleuze's essay, but that this can be challenged in favour of a more nuanced and politically significant reading by contextualising the essay as an attempt to overcome bad faith. In section two, I develop this by drawing out the nature and relevance of the threat posed by bad faith through a focus on Sartrean, Deleuzian and Badioucan critiques of Bartleby, before arguing, in section three, that attention to the concept of a ‘logic of presuppositions’ developed in Deleuze's essay shows how bad faith can be overcome. These sections all build towards the fourth and longest section, which draws out the wider political significance of what it means to overcome bad faith. To do so, I pay attention to how logics of presupposition function in Bartleby's story, and consider Deleuze's essay in relation to his work on ‘control societies’ and ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’. (shrink)

Although Alain Badiou dedicates a number of texts to the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza throughout his work—after all, the author of a systematic philosophy of being more geometrico must be a point of reference for the philosopher who claims that “mathematics = ontology”—the reading offered in Meditation Ten of his key work Being and Event presents the most significant moment of this engagement. Here, Badiou proposes a reading of Spinoza’s ontology that foregrounds a concept that is as central to, (...) and celebrated in, his philosophy as it is strictly excluded by Spinoza: the void. In nuce, Badiou contends that for all of Spinoza’s efforts to offer an ontology of total plenitude, the void returns in his philosophy under the (at first sight) unlikely name of infinite mode. The presence of this errant name in Spinoza’s philosophy bears witness to the failure of his most profound intellectual endeavour. However striking Badiou’s reading of Spinoza, this paper argues that it fails to adequately grasp Spinoza’s metaphysics, particularly with respect to the central concept of modal essence, a concept which does not appear at all in the Badiouian text. By introducing a consideration of this concept, it becomes able to resolve the status of infinite modes, and to account for the move across the notorious finite–infinite divide. Thus the argument turns to the reading of Spinoza offered by Gilles Deleuze for a more thorough-going and nuanced approach, much superior to Badiou’s procrustean critique. (shrink)

This article aims to expose three ways how the facts of the Commune of Paris has had effect of event in the theoretical work of three authors: Guyau, Badiou and Abensour. For Guyau, present in the facts, it meant the absolute transformation towards a post-foundational and de-normativized thought. For Badiou, the Commune, in addition to be an event in itself, the realization of a form of philosophy based on ontological foundations resulting from the transformation of mathematics in recent centuries. And (...) for Abensour it is evident that this absence of foundations that contemporary philosophy holds is concretized in a way of understanding politics and politics as a way of life in which humans articulate permanent and mutable conventions of organization. (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)

As a way of thinking through the bleakness of the political present through which we are all too precipitously moving, this essay attempts to demonstrate the interconnections between three concepts: politics, law and religion. By way of a detailed reading of Rousseau, I try to show how any conception of legitimate politics and law requires a conception of religion at its base and as its basis. In my view, this is highly problematic and in the conclusion an argument is presented (...) for a politics of the supreme fiction, which attempts to show how poetry might take the place of religion. (shrink)

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that (...) Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself. (shrink)

The volume Applied Ethics. Perspectives from Romania is the first contribution that aims at showing to the Japanese reader a sample of contemporary philosophy in Romania. At the same time a volume of contemporary Japanese philosophy is translated into Romanian and will be published by the University of Bucharest Press. -/- Applied Ethics. Perspectives from Romania includes several original articles in applied ethics and theoretical moral philosophy. It is representative of the variety of research and the growing interest in applied (...) ethics in the last few years in Romania. The philosophy practised here is at the same time an international activity, but also a kind of research deeply involved in Romanian realities. The contributors to the volume are Romanian philosophers from the most important Universities in the country, including members of the Romanian Academy, but also junior researchers. -/- This volume was made possible thanks to the relationship established between the Applied Ethics Centres of the University of Bucharest, Romania, and Hokkaido University, Japan. (shrink)

Kako reducirati ljudi na njihovo živalsko podstat? Se je ob tem mogoče izogniti sklicevanju na povratek k prvi naravi? Prispevek na ti vprašanji odgovarja pa podlagi zgodnjih Marxovih del. V ekonomsko-filozofskih rokopisih iz leta 1843 najdemo opazko, da politična ekonomija na delavca gleda z vidika njegove gole živalskosti. Ta diagnoza anticipira dobro znano trditev Alaina Badiouja, da kapitalizem človeka reducira na živalskost. Članek prinaša tezo, da lahko s pomočjo razumevanja Marxove trditve in demonstracije njene legitimnosti bolje razumemo delovanje kapitalizma, pa (...) tudi ovržemo pogoste obtožbe Badioujeve nezmožnosti, da bi ponudil ustrezno razlago kritike politične ekonomije. (shrink)

Članek skuša povezati Marxa in Badiouja na področju, kjer je njun vsebinski stik minimalen, tako rekoč ničen, na področju Marxove kritike politične ekonomije. Poskus njune povezave vodi hipoteza, da obstaja homologija med Badioujevo onto-logiko v Logiki svetov, in analizo vrednostne forme v Marxovem Kapitalu 1. Ključen element te homologije je konceptualna operacija prehoda od realnosti Dvojega k Trojemu kot notranji izjemi Dvojega. V nadaljevanju članek dokazuje, da je mogoče na osnovi tega prehoda rešiti uganko predmetnosti denarnega blaga pri Marxu.

The aim of this article is to highlight the relevance of Lacanian psychoanaly-sis for an understanding of Islamism, unfolding its discursive-ideological complexity. Inan attempt to reply to Fethi Benslama’s recent exploration of the function of the fatherin Islam, I suggest that Benslama’s argument about the ‘delusional’ character of Islamismand the link he envisages between the emergence of Islamism and the crisis of ‘tradi-tional’ authoritative systems, should be further investigated so as to avoid potential risksof essentialism. A different reading of Islamism (...) is proposed, which valorizes ‘creative’attempts by Islamist groups to re-organize the social imaginary within the realm of a sym-bolic economy, thereby positivising the desedimenting effects of the real in different ways.Notions such as capitonage, fantasy, desire, and jouissance are essential for us to under-stand how Islamist trajectories diversify as distinct discursive formations, thereby reveal-ing the psychoanalytical significance of Islam as a master signifier. (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)

Un vínculo necesario entre estética y socialización explica la profundidad sensible que debe construir todo cambio de paradigma y toda re-socialización. La democracia no funciona sin una apropiación individual y colectiva del sentir y de la producción de sentir. Es a partir entonces del trabajo artístico y de la instrospección y exteriorización de la dimensión sensible, que toda transformación puede ser aplicada. Se recorren parcialmente los pensamientos de Alain Badiou y Bernard Stiegler. A required link between aesthetic and socialization explains (...) the sensitive depth that all paradigm and re-socialization must build. Democracy does not work without an individual and collective ownership of feeling and feeling's production. It is from the artwork and the introspection and externalization of the sensitive dimension, that any transformation can be applied. The article covers partially the thoughts of Alain Badiou and Bernard Stiegler. (shrink)