Table of Contents:

Editors’ Introduction

“We are all torturers now”: Accountability After Abu Ghraib — Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas — Erica Weitzman

Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment — Michael Dillon

Event or Exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void — Colin Wright

Imagining Extraordinary Renditions: Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature — Nathan Gorelick

I have reviewed Tamara Chaplin’s Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television

Link

From Jodi Dean

When is a Truth not a Truth?

When it has to be excessively enforced.

This is how Zizek responds to Stavrakakis’s siding with Badiou on the matter of totalitarian danger.

Badiou warns of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation and ignoring the nameless or multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Zizek criticizes Badiou on this point on the grounds of an incompatibility between truth and excessive enforcement. He writes:

a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-event.

This doesn’t strike me as convincing, particularly insofar as Truth is determined retroactively. For this determination to be made, ruthless enforcement may well be necessary. Perhaps the better way to put this is to say that ‘excessive’ has a termporal characteristic. What may seem excessive at one point is later determined to have been just right, even measured as a response. The indeterminacy here is unavoidable.

Zizek’s example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. He says that the truth that was not a truth that Stalinism enforced was the vision of a centralized planned economy. This is a problem for a number of reasons.

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The rest of the videos

A review of Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

A decade ago, Richard Beardsworth stated in his introduction to Derrida and the Political: “the twenty-first century approaches, and it is clear that our political concepts, and, therefore, the fields in which these concepts are discursively organized, acquire meaning and operate, need to be reinvented”.[1] A seism of unheard of proportions has shaken the space of the political, a field whose conceptual system has been elaborated throughout a long history as the effect of a complex and stratified legacy: Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian. Yet, ten years on, the reinvention of the category of the political still remains an imperative and unavoidable task. Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics. However, instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.

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Link

Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality… The first story is the story of the father and the mother.

The rest

Todd May reviews Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere: Rethinking Emancipation

Badiou, Balibar, Rancière is a critical overview of the political thought of three students of Althusser’s, each of whom has moved away from his teacher in a direction different from the others. Hewlett argues that, in a France and indeed in a world that is increasingly neoliberal in both its thought and its practice, there is a need for a renewal of a left theoretical tradition. Each of these thinkers attempts to offer that renewal, with, in Hewlett’s eyes, mixed success.

The book can be read both as an overview of the work of these thinkers and as a critical engagement with them. However, since the discussions are brisk and often introductory, the critical questions raised to these thinkers do not (and, I believe, do not seek to) have much depth. I will argue that, at least in the case of Badiou, there are straightforward ways to answer the criticisms Hewlett raises. However, it should be said immediately that, aside from the criticisms, the overview he provides of each thinker is valuable, and in the cases of Badiou and Rancière, fairly accurate. As I am not a scholar of Balibar’s thought, I cannot comfortably offer judgment of his efforts there.

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TOC

Beyond totem and idol, the sexuate other — Luce Irigaray, Karen I. Burke

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis — Sara Beardsworth

The errant name: Badiou and Deleuze on individuation, causality and infinite modes in Spinoza — Jon Roffe

The practical absolute: Fichte’s hidden poetics — Anthony Curtis Adler

A ravaged site: on time and the law — Peg Birmingham

Richard Polt: The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy — Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation — Richard Polt

Alan Paskow, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation — Robert J. Dostal

Joel Buxton pointed out that there are two Derrida lectures on Religion (Link)

Some  other interesting links, including the ones provided by Alex by Badiou, one on Hobbes, etc. (Link)