AN INSOLUBLE ENIGMA? Greenshields, Will
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
12/2021, Letnik:
26, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
AbstractEvocatively referred to by Alain Badiou as a “final unravelling” and an “insoluble enigma” that “forms an integral part of his enigmatic legacy,” Lacan’s dissolution has long been regarded as ...a quixotic act at odds with reason and common sense. The purpose of this paper, through a close reading of the documents, seminars and epistles regarding dissolution, is to explain the reasons for this action and dispel some of the obscurity surrounding it. I will also attempt to reintegrate the act into Lacan’s intellectual trajectory through an identification of connections between the final and earlier formulations. The question as to how and why Lacan dissolved his school will be approached through the isolation and assessment of three substantive processes: the “research” preceding dissolution, the “work” of dissolution and the “saying” qua act that triggered dissolution.
Towards an evental geography Shaw, Ian G.R.
Progress in human geography,
10/2012, Letnik:
36, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper puts forward a new way of thinking about objects, worlds, and events. The philosophical contribution of the paper pivots around the idea that objects are force-full: smoldering furnaces of ...affects that are capable of creating, policing, and destroying the very contours of existence. The paper begins with a problem, which is how to account for objects, worlds, and events outside of human consciousness or ‘in-themselves’. It answers by constructing an ‘evental geography’ from the ontologies of Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, and Graham Harman. A ‘geo-event’ names the transformation of a world – from galaxies to nation states to ecosystems – by ‘inexistent’ objects and the forces they unleash. The paper is situated at the busy crossroads of (object-oriented) philosophy, non-representational theory, and actor-network theory.
Philosophy attributes to mathematics the exclusive capacity of constructing pure knowledge i.e. the thinking (of ideas) reserving for itself the modes of its representation. In the first part of the ...article, we briefly trace the reverberations of representation stemming from mathematics in the thought from Descartes, Kant to Heidegger, and investigate how they unfold and influence the contemporary philosophies of Alain Badiou and Cornelius Castoriadis. Although the two share a common ontological root in Cantor's naive set theory, this aspect of their thought remains relatively unrelated. In the second part, we closely examine the respective usage of the notion of representation and its transmutation to a mathematical concept of inconsistent multiplicity, consequently arguing for a rare, but particularly important point ofconvergcncc of the two thinkers. It is this contradictory inconsistent multiplicity that represents an abstract concept for thinking Magmas (Castoriadis) or the Absolute (Badiou) both conceiving it as the place in which Trulh(s) arc either ex-nihilo created or eternally residing. KEYWORDS: Badiou; Castoriadis; Inconsistent multiplicity; Representation; Set theory
This thesis pivots on two suppositions: firstly, that historicism as an approach to the past remains dominant in the 21stcentury; and secondly, the work of the philosopher Alain Badiou offers an ...original and altogether radical riposte to this form of historiography. The work as whole is principally focused on the second of these assumptions and seeks to offer the first wide ranging analysis of Badiou's use, development, and transformation of the concept of history. Broken into six chapters, the first five sections center on key texts in Badiou's still developing oeuvre and examine how the growth of his philosophical ideas serve to challenge dominant conceptions of history and the role of the historian. In a hypothetical turn, the final section addresses how these ideas could transform the practices of teaching history and what it means to 'do history' as a meaningful endeavour. The thesis concludes by exploring what forms the 'militant historian' could take outside the narrow strictures of academic life.
In the second half of the 20th century, the traditional notion of the human subject as source of thought and action came under critique by Foucault, Althusser, and others. Foucault called this ...critique “the death of the subject”. In this paper, I seek to show that we can find, occurring at the same time, the development of a conception of the human being as source of thought and action that withstands this “death”, namely Arendt’s theory of action and Badiou’s notion of subject. What unites these two thinkers is that they conceive the subject as plural (that is, composed of several individuals) and as constituted by a principle (that is, unified by a guiding idea).
A partir del examen de cinco propuestas teóricas (Badiou, Deleuze, Rancière, Foucault y Agamben), el artículo encara la posibilidad de pensar el vínculo entre literatura y vida haciendo hincapié en ...algunos conceptos figurales (máquina deseante, pensamiento del afuera, verdadera vida, política de la literatura y fantasma), surgidos de la obra de los filósofos mencionados, que admiten una lectura o relectura en clave post-secular.
The Politics of Logic Livingston, Paul M.
2012, 20120322, 2011, 2011-08-15, 2012-03-22, Letnik:
27
eBook
In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the ...results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures forms the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents.
We turn to experience when confronted by a problem, or so John Dewey's oeuvre suggests. Yet, what use is experience when the problem falls outside the boundaries of the known? Drawing upon a range of ...thinkers — from Alain Badiou to Elaine Scarry to Maggie Nelson — John Buethe takes Dewey's familiar thesis one step further to interrogate experience as preparation for radically unfamiliar circumstances, namely circumstances for which there is no experiential referent. He concludes that not only is an experiential education superior in its ability to bridge learners into the world as it is, it also possibly orients the subject to the good during times of uncertainty. Considering present volatilities within the state and society, the environment, and public health, educators may benefit by viewing experience under this light.
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