In this paper, I argue that for an emancipatory environmental politics to be fundamentally distinct from the liberal democratic tradition, it must take the form of what Alain Badiou terms a 'truth ...procedure'. This form of processual politics structured around an affirmative norm disclosed by an Event--which I here claim to be the emerging ecological crises vis-a-vis modern States--and determined by what Badiou designates the generic will, has the potential to maintain a receptive and reciprocal relation with the environment within which it is situated. To justify this claim, I enlist Alain Badiou's formalist ontology and political thought. I begin with an exegesis of the latter and then, following a discussion of what I designate as the ecological Event, proceed to introduce the environmental activism movement, Extinction Rebellion--one of the first examples of a Badiouian political truth procedure in the 21st century --to animate Badiou's abstract political thought. By referencing Extinction Rebellion and its indubitable success, I demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Badiou's politics and articulate why it ought to guide future environmental-political theories and praxes. In pleading this case, I simultaneously affirm the emancipatory potential that inheres in XR, giving heed to its ontological form. KEYWORDS: Ontology; Ecology; Badiou; Universality; Radical Politics
This article seeks to recalibrate current debates about the value of the humanities by shifting their focus away from notions of the 'distinctiveness' of the humanities. Rather than defining the ...humanities by demarcating their disciplinary boundaries, it suggests that it might be more productive to see them as nodes of networks of intellectual and social practices. The article considers teaching as such a networked intellectual and social practice, before theorising such perspectives via Foucault's and Badiou's notion of the 'contemporary'. The article concludes by turning its attention back to the practice of teaching, approached via the 'abolition of the English Department' proclaimed by Ngũgĩ, Owuor Anyumba and lo Liong in Nairobi in 1969.
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.
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