Malebranche Badiou, Alain; Smith, Jason E; Spitzer, Susan ...
2019, 20190416
eBook
Alain Badiou is perhaps the world's most significant living philosopher. In his annual seminars on major topics and pivotal figures, Badiou developed vital aspects of his thinking on a range of ...subjects that he would go on to explore in his influential works. In this seminar, Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou's thought at a key moment in the years before the publication of his most important work,Being and Event, and a lively interrogation of Malebranche's key text, theTreatise on Nature and Grace. Badiou develops a rigorous yet novel analysis of Malebranche's theory of grace, retracing his claims regarding the nature of creation and the relation between God and world and between God and Jesus. Through Malebranche, Badiou develops a radical concept of truth and the subject. This book renders a seemingly obscure post-Cartesian philosopher fascinating and alive, restoring him to the philosophical canon. It occupies a pivotal place in Badiou's reflections on the nature of being that demonstrates the crucial role of theology in his thinking.
Lacan Badiou, Alain; Reinhard, Kenneth; Spitzer, Susan L ...
2018, 20181016, 2019, 2018-10-16
eBook
The transcript of Alain Badiou's year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, this book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the ...crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou's own thought. It is the first volume of Badiou's seminars to be published in English.
For both Lacan and Badiou, Plato's Parmenides is a primary locus for the question of the One. Moreover, for both Lacan and Badiou, the One ultimately takes on political valence, as key to the ...problematics of representation and the discursive conditions of collectivity. However, unlike Badiou, Lacan's exploration of the question of One also passes through theology- through what I am calling "something of One God"- and I want to argue that it is only by bringing the One into explicit relationship with those monotheistic issues that we can fully understand its implications for analytic discourse and political life. Lacan's thinking on the "something of One" takes a necessary swerve back through a theological problematic, and in the process articulates the terms of a political theology, an essential conjunction of political and religious understandings of sovereignty, subjectivity and collectivity.
Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical ...explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality.InThere's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.
Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Alain Badiou's seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, which consider the relationship between philosophy and notions of "the present.".
The Neighbor Zizek, Slavoj; Santner, Eric L; Reinhard, Kenneth
2013
eBook
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19: 18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to ...love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it, " he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19: 18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined.In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor, " Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen, " Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors.
Widely translated and considered to be the most important philosopher of our time, Alain Badiou is also a novelist and the author of four celebrated comedies and two tragedies. 'The Incident at ...Antioch' is the last of his plays to be published in French and the first to be published in English, introducing a side of Badiou the Anglophone world has never encountered before.
