Continental Philosophy

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Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement
Paul Bowman; Richard Stamp

Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement
Sudeep Dasgupta

Politics without Politics
Jodi Dean
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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)

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

Jacques Rancière is the Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000. He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of Universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. His work has been translated into 14 languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are Disagreement, Politics, and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004), The Flesh of Words (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005), Film Fables (2006), and The Hatred of Democracy (2007).

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 1

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 2

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Video

Questions & Discussion Video

The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Podcast

via Philosophy’s Other

A special issue of Art and Research on Ranciere

And an article, “Zizek for Jews“

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

Link

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism: An Introduction — Yulia Tikhonova

Why I Am a Marxist — Vladislav Sofronov

The Theory of Marxism: Questions and Answers — Vladislav Sofronov; Fredric Jameson; Jack Amariglio; Yahya M. Madra

The Karl Marx School of the English Language — David Riff

You Can’t Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat — Jacques Rancière; Artemy Magun; Dmitry Vilensky; Alexandr Skidan

Profanation of the Profane, or, Giorgio Agamben on the Moscow Biennale — Alexei Penzin

The Story of Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics — David Riff; Dmitry Vilensky

Legally Soviet: A Conversation — Yevgeniy Fiks; Olga Kopenkina

Foucault, Marxism, and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Foucault and the “New Man”: Conversations on Foucault in Cuba — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Massive Change: The Exhibit as Apology for “New Capitalism” — Lauren Langman

From Principle to Context: Marx versus Nozick and Rawls on Distributive Justice — Xiaoping Wei

Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideas on the Cooperative Principle — Anjan Chakrabarti; Anup Kumar Dhar

A new blog on Agamben.

“Philosophical insults” through the history of philosophy: a comic strip

“Plato’s Aesthetics“: new in SEP

Ranciere and Nancy on Vendredi de la philosophie

And finally on the “Viroid Life“

This is the first bilingual online edition of Krisis, journal for contemporary philosophy, after having appeared in print, and in Dutch, for 27 years. We present contributions to four debates. Menno Hurenkamp and Jan-Willem Duyvendak reflect on the question how we can think ‘community’ in today’s Netherlands.

Further, Krisis dedicates a ‘file’ to the recent book of Veit Bader, Secularism or Democracy; Associational Governance of Religious Diversity. He defends the thesis that secularism is not a condition of liberalism and democracy, as many contemporary defenders of ‘The Enlightenment’ contend. Instead, secularism may even partly stand in the way of liberal democracy. After a short introduction to the book by Bader, three critics (Anders Berg-Sørensen, Irena Rosenthal and Anton van Harskamp) present their responses to the book, and Bader replies.

We also publish two pieces by Josef Früchtl and Mieke Bal that formed the basis for a by now rather legendary debate held in March this year about the relation between philosophy and cultural analysis.

Finally, we publish an interview with Jacques Rancière, a representant of the generation of 1968 whose recent rethinking of the relation between aesthetics and politics appears to have revived the relationship between this old couple. Lastly, impressions and reviews. Reactions are welcome at info@krisis.eu.

http://www.krisis.eu

Jappe Groenendijk
Editorial assistant

Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we shouldn’t take the end of history seriously, and that politics isn’t necessarily about end goals but ongoing struggle, then in his recent books on the cinema (Film Fables) and on the image more generally (The Future of the Image), Rancière is again wary of declarative eschatology, of making statements that suggest the end of anything. As he says on the first page of The Future of the Image, he wants to examine “how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate” (p. 1). But, he adds, “does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art?” (p. 1). Central to Rancière’s project is an aesthetic optimism: a sense that there are stories still to be told, and images constantly awaiting creation.

Continue reading here

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.

Continue reading the review

An entire blog dedicated to Jacques Ranciere!

Link

Book Review of Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics : with reflections on Rancière’s art-politics in lieu of the Deleuzian/Guattarian perspective. By Joseph Nechvatal

Jacques Rancière is interesting to me in that he is a critic of defined disciplines/specializations in favor of a ground of aesthetic pleasure brought about through a non-identification with one’s identity (and/or condition) – even while he stresses a refusal of containment/confinement that is simultaneously escapist but possibly emancipatory in its transformational suggestivity. In other words, he believes in the powers of the imagination.

In his book The Politics of Aesthetics Rancière comes right out and declares as much already in the forward when he states that he is concerned here with “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of subjectivity”. (p. 9) So, first off, how can “new modes of sense perception” be created which can potentially help remove the subject out of his/her glib indolence? We will here examine that. Then I will compare and contrast some of Rancière’s approach to art and politics with that of the philosophic rhizomatic theory (1) of Gilles Deleuze ) and Félix Guattari ), which, at a general level, supports such an interdisciplinarian connectivist approach – as their rhizomatic theory encouraged non-linear and non-restrictive interdisciplinary thinking-doing.

Continue reading here 

[From the South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004) pp. 297-310.]
As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—a rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the "formalism" of those rights had been one of the first targets of the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy.

The rest…

An interview with Ranciere in Le Monde Diplomatique (via PTDR), which centers on Ranciere's political aesthetics.

Also: a review of two of Ranciere's works:

• The Politics of Aesthetics
• The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing

The editors of Parrhesia – A Journal of Critical Philosophy are pleased to announce that the inaugural issue is now available online:

Editors' Introduction Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Matthew Sharpe

Truth-telling in Foucault's "Le gouvernment de soi et des autres" and Persius 1: the Subject, Rhetoric, and Power Paul Allan Miller

Nomadology or Ideology? Zizek's Critique of Deleuze Robert Sinnerbrink

Sadism and Masochism: A Symptomatology of Analytic and Continental Philosophy? Jack Reynolds

The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler Geoff Boucher

Overhearing Bartelby: Agamben, Melville and Inoperative Power Arne De Boever