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. […]

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

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?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

‘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

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