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

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)

The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is always difficult to grasp in Hegel, not least because it takes such a variety of appearances: (...) as an inexorable process, as an unexpected leap, or as an invisible movement that seems to take place behind our backs at moments of greatest stalemate. But this particular transition is especially challenging—not simply because it is so unprepared but also because it complicates the idea of the absolute as consummation of the encyclopaedic system. Hegel clearly explains why absolute spirit requires objective spirit. Art, religion and philosophy all depend on a world of pre-existing social practices from which they must nonetheless wrest a special kind of independence. But why the reverse? Why does objective spirit need to surpass itself in forms of spirit that overreach and may even, as we will argue, undermine it? What is the insufficiency in politics that requires the supplement of cultural practices that will destabilise it? Conversely, what is the specific autonomy that absolute spirit requires for its absolution, and what are the political stakes and risks of this autonomy? (shrink)

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.

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.

For Badiou serves both as an introduction to the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and as an in-depth examination of his work. Ruda begins with a thorough and clear outline of the sometimes difficult main tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. He then traces the philosophers throughout Western thought who have influenced Badiou’s project—especially Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—and on whose work Badiou has developed his provocative philosophy. Ruda draws from Badiou’s oeuvre a series of directives with regard to renewing philosophy (...) for the twenty-first century. For Badiou continues the interrogations of its subject and raises new materialistic and dialectical questions for the next generation of engaged philosophers. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Giorgio Agamben: Signatura rerum. Zur Methode. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2009, 146 S. Giorgio Agamben: Nacktheiten. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2010, 200 S. Giorgio Agamben: Herrschaft und Herrlichkeit. Zur theologischen Genealogie von Ökonomie und Regierung (Homo sacer, II.2). Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, 368 S. Giorgio Agamben: Das Sakrament der Sprache. Eine Archäologie des Eides (Homo sacer, II.3), Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, 98 S.

In capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalism’s development, registers the reductive and regressive tendencies produced by capitalism’s effect on individuals and society. Ruda examines a problem that has invisibly been shaping the history of modern, especially rationalist philosophical thought, a problem of misunderstanding freedom. Thinkers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx claim (...) that there are conceptions and interpretations of freedom that lead the subjects of these interpretations to no longer act and think freely. They are often unwillingly led into unfreedom. It is thus possible that even “freedom” enslaves. Modern philosophical rationalism, whose conceptual genealogy the books traces and unfolds, assigns a name to this peculiar form of domination by means of freedom: indifference. Indifference is a name for the assumption that freedom is something that human beings have: a given, a natural possession. When we think freedom is natural or a possession we lose freedom. Modern philosophy, Ruda shows, takes its shape through repeated attacks on freedom as indifference; it is the owl that begins its flight, so that the days of unfreedom will turn to dusk. (shrink)

"Der Beitrag verhandelt den Begriff des Muts und beginnt diese Verhandlung ausgehend von der Frage, wie eine Kategorie, die die Geschichte der Philosophie zu durchziehen scheint, gegenwärtig an Relevanz und Einfluss verlieren kann. Er identifiziert den Grund dafür in der aristotelischen Bestimmung des Muts als männlich-militärischer Tugend und setzt dieser Bestimmung in der Folge eine Neubestimmung entgegen, die zu denken versucht, was weiblicher Mut sein kann. The paper discusses the concept of courage, starting from the question of how it is (...) possible that a category, which seems to permeate the history of philosophy, currently loses its relevance and influence. It identifies the rea- son for this in the Aristotelian definition of courage as a male and military virtue, and subsequently confronts it with a new definition, trying to imagine what female courage could be like. ". (shrink)

The paper discusses Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception as a phenomenology of art. The prevalence of examples from the arts in his text indicates that works of art possess the very same dynamic of reflexivity that the phenomenological project as a whole seeks to develop. Furthermore, by way of confrontation with works of art, the project is driven to transcend itself – or more precisely: to reflect itself. This »new style« of reflexivity may be discussed as »aesthetic incorporation.«.

The article starts from delineating the precise coordinates of the concept of action as it can be found in the work of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. It argues in detail why to properly grasp its reach and with it what is at stake in the two philosophical enterprises can best be comprehended when it is read as an attempt of re-actualizing Marx. But, as the article demonstrates, actualization does not come down to being a mere gesture of repetition. It (...) rather involves a complex linkage of different elements that can be best captured by the psychoanalytic slogan of remembering, repeating and working through. It implies remembering Marx gesture, repeating his involvement with Hegel and a working through of the concept of negation. All this gives rise to a new form of ideology critique and a new form of materialist dialectics. The article systematically reconstructs the different articulations which the actualization of Marx finds in Žižek and Badiou and ends by marking a crucial difference with regard to their renewed dialectics. (shrink)