This book on Alain Badiou’s philosophy begins with a central theme: the attempt to trace how Badiou has replaced the tradition of critical theory and negation with an affirmative support of his four generic procedures (art, science, love, and art) as inseparable from his revitalization of both the subject and the concept of truth. By defining four procedures as conditions of philosophy, Badiou makes the attempt to establish each as inter-related and systematically necessary to make a new proposal for thought. (...) The fidelity to Badiou’s project for the 21st century, however, requires a fundamental examination: are his four truths complicated by an inescapable dilemma? And if so, can the four truths be retained, as a whole, or does the individual reader have to make a decision that will alter Badiou’s project and conclusions? By presenting the dilemmas of his thought, the scholarly reader will be in a position to then pursue the necessary study to come to their own conclusions and, by doing so, become sufficiently free to resist the many coercions of social and political life in liberal democracies today. (shrink)

Freud, the Contemporary Super ego and the West traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the twenty first century. Giosue Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as the return of the religious, presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud. Ghisalberti argues that the West has regressed to an infantile and (...) primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, the obsessional neuroses. The book reexamines Freuds early psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and returns to his grounding ideals and a comprehensive defense of the coming to be human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego and the West will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities. (shrink)

The project examines the reasons for the many philosophical difficulties, and the failures, that Nietzsche sensed when he had concluded The Birth of Tragedy. The subsequent philosophical decision he made, on the way to reconceiving the classical ideas of tragedy, destiny, and martyrdom, allowed him to begin to conceive of what he would identify as a thinking devoted to affirmation. Everything he commits himself to writing after 1872, including the unpublished notes on myth from the Philosophenbuch, is a response to (...) the disillusionment of his belief in Dionysos and the false promise of tragic affirmation. The Greek god had become a problem and an obstacle. Sustaining him, as a philosophical idea, was going to prove to be highly mixed; the struggle would become relentless. The Greek god is, in many ways, impossible to believe in as an ideal, in antiquity or for the present; and for a specific reason: the connection between the institution of the Dionysian festival and the religious ritual of sacrifice could not be ignored by Nietzsche. His sense of a "Dionysian nausea" has been overlooked. Tragedy and sacrifice are a binding relation in the Greek polis. Nietzsche seems to recognize the fact and commits himself to directly confronting the tragedy/sacrifice relation in all his subsequent works and with the intent on being a unique, individual resource for the truth of his self-revelations. He identifies himself with a new conception of the martyr (the witness) in order to provide an alternative to the classical martyr as the victim of violence and death and who, moreover, is executed by the state. Socrates and Jesus are omni-present for him. Nietzsche presents himself as new world-historical alternative and the self-revelations of a witness for the individuals he will often call (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) his friends and neighbours and disciples. Is the whole of his philosophical enterprise successful? Do his self-revelations lead to the creation of the free spirit and therefore give him some assurance about the future of his legacy? Or does his commitment to the eternal recurrence, for example, lead him to a terrible realization? The study presents the force of Nietzsche's thought as he created the resources, which he hoped could be effectively transferred to a reader, to begin to create an affirmative reality he defines from out of the fullness of the free spirit and the philosopher. (shrink)

In the letters written to the Thessalonians, Paul’s teaching appears to be irreconcilably divided between a still influential Judaic apocalyptic eschatology and (due to Timothy’s considerable influence in the development of the gospel), an emphasis on Hellenistic self-transformation and, in particular, how the philosophy of Epicurus contributed to the psychological health of recent converts. By interpreting the rhetoric of wrath, quiet, sleep, and childbirth, Paul’s teaching as it emerges in 1 and 2 Thessalonians reveals how the gospel must necessarily encounter, (...) agonistically, two foundations of thought. During the early composition of the letters to his churches, Paul struggles ambivalently between the persistence of a Judaic past and its metaphysical promise of a parousia and eschaton, and the realization that Hellenistic philosophy, and Timothy’s Epicurean pastoral care, provides immediate comfort to the well-being of others. (shrink)

In the letters written to the Thessalonians, Paul’s teaching appears to be irreconcilably divided between a still influential Judaic apocalyptic eschatology and (due to Timothy’s considerable influence in the development of the gospel), an emphasis on Hellenistic self-transformation and, in particular, how the philosophy of Epicurus contributed to the psychological health of recent converts. By interpreting the rhetoric of wrath, quiet, sleep, and childbirth, Paul’s teaching as it emerges in 1 and 2 Thessalonians reveals how the gospel must necessarily encounter, (...) agonistically, two foundations of thought. During the early composition of the letters to his churches, Paul struggles ambivalently between the persistence of a Judaic past and its metaphysical promise of a parousia and eschaton, and the realization that Hellenistic philosophy, and Timothy’s Epicurean pastoral care, provides immediate comfort to the well-being of others. (shrink)