Theory & Event

Like the maze of streets and local precincts of the unplanned city, a number of interconnected thematic concerns link the articles and reviews in this issue. It is appropriate, as we pass the first anniversary of September 11 2001, that the first essay should be French philosopher Alain Badiou’s ‘Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts’. Badiou’s reflections on the responses to Sept 11 traverse a number of the themes which were canvassed in our special issue 5.4, including the propagandistic use of language that is employed in the ‘war on terrorism’ and what he calls ‘the disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms’ which characterises the opposing sides in this conflict.

His concluding reflections on the role of philosophy in the face of such events set the scene for what turns out to be a pre-eminent theme of this issue, namely the relationships that intellectuals in general, philosophers in particular, have to politics and to political issues of the day. Badiou himself is a highly political thinker, a former Althusserian and Maoist who does not fit the mold of more widely known French poststructuralists. His idiosyncratic and untimely allegiances to Platonism, set theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are sympathetically displayed in a book which is ably reviewed by Adrian Johnston in this issue, Jason Barker’s Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction..

Although on a very different topic and in a different style, Melvin Rogers’ ‘Liberalism, Narrative and Identity: A Pragmatic Defence of Racial Solidarity’ provides a no less trenchant exemplar of productive intellectual engagement with an important contemporary political issue. Rogers proposes a pragmatist re-reading of narrative theory in order to defend the importance of racial solidarity for political deliberation and theory. He draws on the historical experience of African American responses to discrimination and exclusion to defend a non-essentialist concept of racial solidarity. In doing so, he develops a novel approach to the ongoing debate over the advisibility of a colour blind public sphere in multicultural liberal democracies.

The question of intellectuals’ relation to political events is also at the heart of Adam Sitze’s wide ranging study of Hannah Arendt, ‘Flight in Dark Times’. Sitze’s essay begins by reading The Human Condition as a calculated intervention into a particular post-war conjuncture, and proceeds to show how Arendt’s entire post-war oeuvre was engaged in a series of complex debates with Heidegger, Zionism and Marxism. Above all, he argues, with explicit reference to our own time, Arendt’s 1959 speech ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, presents a compelling case for the inescapable obligation of an intellectual engagement that refuses the comfort of thoughtless slogans.

Arendt’s response to Heidegger’s Nazism is one of the episodes discussed in Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, reviewed in this issue by Christopher C. Robinson along with two other books which address similar themes: John McCumber’s Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. This review offers a fascinating survey of different contexts and ways in which intellectuals have engaged, or failed to engage, with the political issues of the day. It sounds a cautionary note against efforts to establish too close connections between metaphysical ideas and political positions. A similar point is made in Matthew J. Moore’s informative and judicious assessment of Nathan Widder’s Genealogies of Difference.

Finally, Carolyn DiPalma’s review essay, ‘Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology, Nature and Culture’ examines four books dealing with the politics of embodiment, medical science, technology, nature and culture. She provides a fascinating overview of recent scholarship that addresses another important precinct in the maze of contemporary theory, namely the paths by which power and knowledge determine the embodied character of our lives.