Continental Philosophy

Alain Badiou
Is the Word “Communism” Forever Doomed?

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=323

I name ‘event’, a rupture in the normal disposition of bodies and normal ways of a particular situation. Or if you want, I name ‘event’ a rupture of the laws of the situation. So, in its very importance, an event is not the realization/variation of a possibility that resides inside the situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility. An event changes not only the real, but also the possible. An event is at the level not of simple possibility, but at the level of possibility of possibility. […]
I name ‘state’ or ‘state of the situation’ the system of constraints, which precisely limit the possibility. For example today I name the state of our situation, capitalist economy, constitutional form of government, veridical laws about the order of labor, army, police, and so on – all that composes the state of our situation. The state defines what is possible and what isn’t. So an event is always something which happens beyond the state. And therein lies the difference between an event and a simple fact. […]
I name ‘truth procedure’ or ‘truth’ an organization of consequences of an event. The process or the fact of naming the process of what follows an event. […]

Critical Horizons:A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

VOLUME 10 (2009) ISSUE 2

**SPECIAL ISSUE**
Ethics of Commitment and Politics of Resistance:
Simon Critchley’s Neo-Anarchism
Edited by Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

Contents

Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance: Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

On Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
Alain Badiou
 
Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink
 
“Critchley is Zizek”: In Defence of Critical Political Philosophy
Matthew Sharpe

The Common Root of Commitment, Resistance and Power
Karin de Boer
 
Speaking to the People: Critchley, Rousseau and the Deficit in Practical Rationality
Philip A. Quadrio
 
Which Anarchism? On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Infinity for (Political) Life: A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Nina Power
 
A Plea for Prometheus
Alberto Toscano
 
Humorous Commitments and Non-Violent Politics: A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Fiona Jenkins
 
Mystical Anarchism
Simon Critchley

Click here to read the articles

FEATURES

Cinema as a Democratic Emblem
Alain Badiou, translated by Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon

The Desert Island and the Missing People
Vanessa Brito, translated by Justin Clemens

Althusser and the concept of the spontaneous philosophy of scientists
Pierre Macherey, translated by Robin Mackay

68 + 1: Lacan’s année érotique
Jean-Michel Rabaté

ESSAYS

The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in The Will to Knowledge
Keith Crome

In the Middle
Sean Gaston

REVIEWS

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Danielle Sands

‘Without wanting to push the analysis further …’: Jean-Michel Rabaté and the Materialities of Theory
Pieter Vermeulen

The rest

In a BBC HARDtalk interview broadcast on 24 March 2009, Stephen Sackur talks to French socialist philospher Alain Badiou. As the world’s richest economies plunge deeper into recession could there be a whiff of revolution in the air? Alain Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France’s anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. His recent book ‘The Meaning of Sarkozy’, in which he attacked the French President, has caused a storm in France. But does anyone beyond Parisian café society believe communism is the answer to the current crisis?

Earlier this month, as many readers know, Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek all participated at the conference “On the Idea of Communism.” For those of us who sadly missed it, Monthly Review has a good recap of links. If you know of more, please post them in the comments! (See also the lacan.com article)

Slavoj Zizek
Beckett with Lacan – part 1
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=78

The achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit which pushed Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. We touch the Lacanian Real when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism.

Beckett with Lacan – part 2
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=102

The basic constellation is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where the couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent impotent witness which fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said, and the speaking subject itself is deprived of its dignified status of “person” and reduced to a partial object. And, consequently, since meaning is generated only by means of the detour of the speaker’s word through a consistent big Other, the speech itself ultimately functions at a pre-semantic level, as a series of explosions of libidinal intensities.

Alain Badiou
Figures of Subjective Destiny: Samuel Beckett
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=21

Why there is a close relationship between poetry and philosophy, or more generally between literature and philosophy? It’s because philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms of the destiny of the human subject. And precisely new forms of the concrete becoming of the human subject when this subject is confronted to its proper truth.

On Communism – Libération 01/26.08
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=125

My position, reinforced by a recent trip to Palestine, is that today it is absolutely imperative to separate politics from religion, just like it should be separated, for example, from racial or identity questions. Religions can and must coexist in the same country, but only if politics and the State are separate.

Link

‘You cannot make a living just being a theoretician’: An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté
With Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

Beyond Resistance: a response to Žižek’s critique of Foucault’s subject of freedom
Aurelia Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain Badiou
Hollis Phelps

This year it is exactly 60 years since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Krisis’ new issue is therefore dedicated to philosophy and human rights. Regina Kreide, Ernst van den Hemel and Marc de Wilde write about a wide range of philosophical issues connected with human rights, and Thomas Poell and Sudeep Dasgupta review two recent publications about human rights.

Ernst van den Hemel: ‘Included but not Belonging. Badiou and Rancière on Human Rights’.
In this article the standpoints on Human Rights by two contemporary French philosophers, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière are explored. Their criticalreading of the project of Human Rights moves away from the reading that we can see in the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben.Instead both Badiou and Rancière offer a critical version of Human Rights thatcan be subsumed under the phrase ‘included but not belonging’. Theirinterventions on Human Rights reveal, besides important similarities,significant differences. For Badiou, notions likehuman rights, and democracy, should be rejected altogether, whereas Rancièrestill sees critical potential for both the project of human rights and democracy.This difference can be attributed to the divergent notions of truth that thetwo philosophers apply. The article ends with a sketch of the critical andmilitant potential of the work of these two theorists.
http://krisis.eu/content/2008-3/2008-3-03-hemel.pdf

Regina Kreide: ‘Power and Powerlessness of Human Rights. The International Discourse on Human Rights’.
The goal of this article is to reconstruct the arguments brought forward in international political discourse and political theory discourse, and to present a suggestion for the conditions of a context-sensible foundation and juridification of human rights. In this course neither the objections of opponents of a universalistic human rights conception are overlooked, nor claims to universally valid human rights, equally effective for all humans, are given up.
http://krisis.eu/content/2008-3/2008-3-02-kreide.pdf

Here

FREE ADMISSION

ALAIN BADIOU, lacanian ink events — New York, Autumn 2008 for the launching of lacanian ink 32:

IS THE WORD “COMMUNISM” FOREVER DOOMED? sponsored by the Miguel Abreu Gallery, at Henry St. Settlement, Harry de Jur Playhouse, 466 Grand St. NY 10002 (at Pitt St.), November 6 at 7 p.m. – (212) 995-1774

POETRY, PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS at The Tilton Gallery, 8 E. 76 St., November 7 at 7 p.m. – (212) 737-2221

JOSEFINA AYERZA will introduce the events

Josefina Ayerza
To resume again…
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII1.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other IV
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII2.html

Jacques-Alain Miller
The Other Side of Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII3.html

Alain Badiou
The Son’s Aleatory Identity in Today’s World
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII4.html

Lilia Mahjoub
The Image in the Fantasy
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII5.html

Massimo Recalcati
Madness and Structure in Jacques Lacan
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII6.html

Jean-Luc Nancy
Strange Foreign Bodies
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII7.html

Slavoj Zizek
Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII8.html

Josefina Ayerza
Cecily Brown, Doug Aitken
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXXII9.html

TOC

On Iris Young’s subject of inclusion: Rethinking political inclusion — Marina Falbo

Free speech or equal respect?: Liberalism’s competing values — John William Tate

The status struggle: A recognition-based interpretation of the positional economy — Rutger Claassen

Alain Badiou: the event of becoming a political subject — Antonio Calcagno

Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity — Espen Hammer

TOC:

Measure-taking: meaning and normativity in Heidegger’s philosophy — Steven Crowell
The destiny of freedom: in Heidegger — Hans Ruin
On Simmel’s conception of philosophy — Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Olli Pyyhtinen
Collective self-legislation as an Actus Impurus: a response to Heidegger’s critique of European nihilism — Hans Lindahl
Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian transcendental idealism — Adrian Johnston
DeLanda’s ontology: assemblage and realism — Graham Harman

Comments on Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding — ALAIN BADIOU (with an introduction by SIMON CRITCHLEY)
Emblems and Cuts: Philosophy in and against History — ALBERTO TOSCANO
“Living with an Idea”: Ethics and Politics in Badiou’s Logiques des mondes — GABRIEL RIERA
From Universality to Equality: Badiou’s Critique of Rancière — JEFF LOVE AND TODD MAY
The Consistency of Inconsistency: Alain Badiou and the Limits of Mathematical Ontology — TZUCHIEN THO
The Scintillation of the Event: On Badiou’s Phenomenology — GERT-JAN VAN DER HEIDEN
What is to be Done? Alain Badiou and the Pre-Evental — NICK SRNICEK
Paulitics — DAN MELLAMPHY AND NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY
Book Panel/Table ronde
Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History — ALAIN BEAULIEU, FADI ABOU-RIHAN, EUGENE HOLLAND, JAY LAMPERT
Student Essay Prize/Prix-étudiant — The Body as Measurant of All: Dis-covering the World–FLORENTIEN VERHAGE

We are glad to annouce the nummer 0 of the new magazine “INAESTHETICS” published by Tobias Huber and Marcus Steinweg.

The idea of the journal INAESTHETICS lies in insisting in an alliance or friendship between two independent ways of touching truth: Art and philosophy belong together insofar as each maintains its autonomy. The friendship between art and philosophy can only be thought as an alliance between autonomous contacts with truth. The journal INAESTETHICS is dedicated above all to this ideal of autonomous collaboration and friendship. Our aim is, instead of pursuing a single direction in thinking, to give room to the contradictoriness which keeps the thinking of art and the thinking of philosophy, as well as the thinking of the friendship between art and philosophy, in a state of permanent restless, which helps to create new categories and terms. We want to establish INAESTHETICS as a place of encounter between art and philosophy. And, as we all know, an encounter can only take place when its outcome and consequences remain uncertain.

The magazine contains texts in english, french and german language.

Content:

Editorial
Alain Badiou: Thèses sur l art contemporain / Fifteen theses on contemporary art / 15 Thesen zur zeitgenössischen Kunst
Bruno Bosteels im Gespräch mit Alain Badiou: Kann man das Neue denken?
Bruno Bosteels: Art, Politics, History: Notes on Badiou and Rancière / Kunst, Politik, Geschichte: Bemerkungen zu Badiou und Rancière
Alexandre Costanzo: L Odyssée du réel
Jacques Rancière: Penser entre les disciplines: une esthétique de la connaissance / Zwischen den Disziplinen denken: eine Ästhetik der Erkenntnis
Zur Aktualität ästhetischer Autonomie: Juliane Rebentisch im Gespräch
Marcus Steinweg: Definition der Kunst / Definition of Art
Sebastian Egenhofer: Zur Topik des Werkbegriffs in der Moderne
Alexander García Düttmann: Der Schein

see: http://www.inaesthetik.net/ / order “INAESTHETICS” here: http://www.diaphanes.de/scripts/buch.php?ID=132

Tobias Huber, Marcus Steinweg (eds.)
INAESTHETIK NR. 0
Theses on Contemporary Art
160 pages
ISBN 978-3-03734-034-9
2008, diaphanes, Zurich-Berlin

2007 Koehn Event in Critical Theory. Alain Badiou and Etienne Balibar dialogue on “Universalism.”

Link

(h/t/: Richard Clarke)

Link

(h/t: Robert Sinnerbrink)

NB: CFP FOR VOLUME 20 IS EXTENDED TO SEP 30

Volume 19: Sense and Nonsense
ISBN 1 897646 15 1

This volume is currently available. For ways to buy this issue click here

Sense and Nonsense

The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze’s Ontological Proposition: RAY BRASSIER
Expression and Immanence: MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI
Nonsense and Mysticism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ANGELA BREITENBACH
Epistemology and the Civil Union of Sense and Self-Contradiction: A Co-ordinated Solution to the Shared Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology: JEREMY BARRIS
Presuppositionless Scepticism: IOANNIS TRISOKKAS

Varia

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy: A Short Overview of the Whole Work; On the Categories; Antinomies. Ideas.: SALOMON MAIMON
Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism: ADRIAN O. JOHNSON
Alain Badiou: Truth, Mathematics, and the Claim of Reason: CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
On the Horrors of Realism: An Interview with Graham Harman: TOM SPARROW