This article reconstructs Badiou’s oeuvre from the vantage point of the last volume of his Being and Event trilogy. It determines the perspective and task of The Immanence of Truths and demonstrates in what way an “absolute ontology” is the result of an act of forcing that serves as the measure for a truth’s truthness. This allows to argue that Badiou’s is and always was a philosophy of freedom.

This article examines a contemporary proposal of how to conceive of materialism, more specifically of a materialist dialectics. This proposal was formulated by Alain Badiou and it is of huge interest for the contemporary discussion as it inscribes the very historical coordinates in which it was articulated into its own proposal. The article develops this by arguing that Badiou's materialist dialectic historically situates itself after idealist options seem to have become impossible. However, the very dialectical kernel of this materialism leads (...) Badiou to claim that after the perpetuated struggle between materialism and idealism is declared to have been overcome, the very split separating the two returns in an inverted form inside materialism, splitting it again into two. Thereby the immanent split in materialism leads to two options: either one defends a materialism devoid of any idealist reference or a materialism which seeks to rescue something of idealism. The article concludes by suggesting that only from a detailed reconstruction of the functioning of philosophy in Badiou's system does it become possible to conceive of the threats that any materialism today faces and to delineate the proposed option of how to avoid them consistently. The article demonstrates how, today, materialism can only be properly materialist by resurrecting something of idealism, which is why it deserves the name of what I call an “idealism without idealism.”. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 163-180, September 2011.

The article attempts to develop a diagonal towards classical readings of the humanism of early Marx. Traditionally, referring to early Marx meant to either affirm a substantialist conception of human beings or to criticize the same conception by insisting on a break between early and late Marx. By presenting a lecture badiousienne of early Marxian texts, the article shows how an affirmative reference to man as species-being and as part of a ‘generic humanity’ can be thought without falling back into (...) the substantialist traps of classical humanism. In a systematic and forced construction of the Marxian idea of the evental character of actual communist action and of universal production, the article shows how Marx’s concept of human species life can be understood as the central source of a transformed thinking of humanism. Consequently, neither Badiou nor Marx will be rendered as classical humanists or pure anti-humanists, rather the early Marxian thought will be presented as a philosophical armoury of in-humanism that is still of great use for sharpening one’s conceptual tools. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux has made his step to the forefront of contemporary philosophy with harsh criticism of the very idea of critique and any critical project following Kant’s philosophy. The article provides a critical assessment of Meillassoux’s approach (and in passing also tackles those of Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant). The basic argument is that the so called “speculative realist / materialist” approach is less materialist than such approach assumes by fundamentally repeating a Heideggerian move that surprisingly does not turn (...) to poetry but to science. In the final part, the politically problematic outcomes of such an endeavour are delineated in a polemical discussion of the work of Elie Ayache. The totality of the article argues for a revivifying of the idea of critique – not in its traditional guise but in what the author calls a meta-critical approach. (shrink)

The present issue of Filozofski Vestnik starts from a concatenation – science and thought – that at first sight is the radical opposite to Heidegger’s diagnosis. The title of this issue, “Science and Thought”, already suggests that there is or at least there can be such a relation. With regard to Heidegger, this implies two options here: either Heidegger was wrong in his criticism of metaphysics or he was wrong with his equation of Ge-Stell (as the essence of technology) and (...) science. Simply put: either metaphysics still contains some sort of valuable thought (and hence there could be some sort of metaphysical science that thinks) or science is simply not reducible to the metaphysics or to the being of a mere technology in the sense that Heidegger criticized. Then the (metaphysical) question of being could be separated from technology and metaphysics, but perhaps it still finds its locus rather within science. Heidegger’s claim about metaphysics and technology then would find itself inverted through the suggested relation of science and thought. Such an inversion of Heidegger’s critique of the very status of science is itself conditioned by the recent developments in philosophy that we take as the starting point for the present issue of Filozosfki Vestnik. (shrink)

This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.

Slavoj Žižek has been widely described as one of the most important and influential contemporary thinkers, philosophers, and cultural critics. However, despite the often critical attention and reviews his work garners in scholarly journal articles and books, systematic philosophical engagements with Žižek's thought remain a surprisingly rare phenomenon. Counteracting this dearth of substantive interaction, the contributors to this volume engage with crucial and fundamental aspects of Žižek's thought. The book follows a Hegelian motivation that is itself dear to Žižek, tracing (...) the concept of dialectical materialism in his more recent work. It takes as its concrete starting point the most current, systematic elaborations of Žižek's thought, namely Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism as well as his magnum opus Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The contributors provide concrete elaborations of arguments developed within these two works, giving voice to their universal implications. The book also features an afterword by Žižek himself, in which he critically examines the work of Levi Bryant as well as the tradition of object-oriented-ontology on the whole. (shrink)

Fatalism in times of universalized assthetization -- Protestant fatalism: predestination as emancipation -- Ren the fatalist: abolishing (Aristotelian) freedom -- From Kant to Schmid (and back): the end of all things -- Ending with the worst: Hegel and absolute fatalism -- After the end: Freud against the illusion of psychical freedom.