Despite his longstanding silence regarding Marx’s Capital, I wish here to argue that Badiou has in fact, in the three volumes of Being and Event, produced the materials for a contemporary logic of the capitalist social form. He has done so, however, in the form of an arsenal of abstract concepts that have yet to be precisely measured against Marx’s critical and formal reproduction of capitalism, the systematic exposition of which consumes the three volumes of Capital. I first argue (...) that Badiou’s general disinterest in the logic of capitalism and Marx’s Capital specifically takes on a strongly symptomatic, spectral presence in the 1994-1995 seminar Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3. Secondly, while it is true that Badiou’s Logics of Worlds never discusses the logic of appearance that governs all capitalist things, it is possible nonetheless to read Logics as an abstract translation and formalisation of Marx’s Capital. In this view, Capital should quite simply be read as a systematic demonstration of the logic of what Marx calls the capitalist social form, which is to say, in Badiou’s jargon, the logic or science of the appearance of things in the capitalist world. In a sense, then, this means nothing more, though nothing less, than subjecting the Logics of Worlds to a Marxian torsion: in order to demonstrate that which Badiou has neglected, Marx has in fact already accomplished, i.e. the systematic, synthetic demonstration of the necessary forms of the appearance of commodities in the capitalist social form. (shrink)

While the explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx's Capital remained largely limited to Reading Capital, after 1968, Nick Nesbitt argues, this theoretical intervention remained insistent, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. The book thus analyzes the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites including Althusser's unpublished archive, Macherey's exposition of Spinoza's Ethics, and Badiou's Logics of Worlds, while simultaneously bringing this fully-developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself, (...) to show that Spinoza's influence on Marx is far greater--and that of Hegel increasingly diminishing--than has been previously thought. (shrink)

While Logics of Worlds already emphasized that one’s participation in a process of truth is signalized by an affect and already pointed out some of the affects connected with these processes (enthusiasm, joy, pleasure, beatitude), the further elaboration of this topics remains the task of the third part of the Being and Event, which has yet to be written and is entitled The Immanence of Truths. The first part of the lecture discusses the very reasons for this work, its (...) necessity, and its place in my opus thus far. The task of The Immanence of Truths is to elaborate the question of how somebody is incorporated into a truth-process, how this relates to the question of the subject and the very role of philosophy itself. The latter is not the process of truth in a similar manner as its four conditions, it does presuppose them, but not the other way around. A short sketch of the inner structure of The Immanence of Truths follows and the argument in favour of the transformation of the formal category of negation. The role of the paraconsistent logics in The Immanence of Truths is to conceptualize the process of truth. The aleatory, the contingent character of any event namely means that we have to insist that there is a cut and that the truth is in the position of an exception, but which, however, is not something untransmittable. Concerning the question of the transmission and the ineffable, I distance myself in relation to Plato’s as well as to Bergson’s treatment of this question. For me, the category of an exception is a dialectical category. It has to be thought on one hand as a negation, which is not a miracle of some sort, and on the other as something inner, immanent (perhaps that was aimed at by Lacan with the term ‘extimacy’). The negation is namely an operator which simultaneously divides and includes, it is also part of the dialectical thought which includes the contingent and is therefore not deterministic. Everything that has been said so far has consequences for the functions of philosophy and concerns the question of the relationship between philosophy and life. Philosophy for me as a discipline departs from the conviction that there are truths. It is triple, being at the same time the diagnostics of an age, the construction of the concept of truth, and the existential experience of true life i.e. the immanent experiment of what is a true life, “what is it to live”. This is signalled by the affect of true life and by the formula “to live as an immortal”, which does not entail any kind of sacrifice or recompense. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

"French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) introduces the concept of democratic materialism to refer to the belief that there are only bodies and languages, then employs a fair amount of science in what he calls a somewhat fastidious examine of it. He covers formal theory on the subject (meta-physics); the greater logics: the transcendental, the object, and relation; the four forms of change; the theory of points; what a body is; and what it is to live."--Provided by publisher.

Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power is a superb study of the relevance of Hegel's logic to Marx's theory. Hegel is often dismissed by Marxists as an ‘idealist’ denying the reality of the world, as if Hegel were Bishop Berkeley with a German accent.1 Abazari recognizes this is not the case: ‘(T)he logical categories are not self-standing, but shadow, or track, the empirical world’ (Abazari 2020: 7). But the world in its full actuality does not simply consist of the (...) objects we sense or perceive. It is intrinsically intelligible, and its intelligibility can be comprehended only in thought. When it is, the ‘idealist’ thesis of the identity (in difference) of thought and being holds. Anyone asserting a truth claim implicitly asserts this identity. In so far as Marx asserts that Capital comprehends the capitalist mode of production, he too is an ‘idealist’ in the Hegelian sense of the term. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore Alain Badiou’s longstanding project of theorizing political situations and political transformation through the analysis of forms and formalisms. This amounts, I argue, to a politics of form that draws on the thought of Sartre, Althusser, and Lacan, but offers new alternatives for political thought and action today. In particular, Badiou’s rigorous consideration of forms, which draws on mathematics, model theory, set theory, and category theory, allows him to theorize political change in a way that avoids (...) the errors of existing critical approaches. Central to this consideration are Badiou’s theory of what he calls the event, which summons itself into existence by its own naming of itself or auto‐nomination, and his recent theory of the plurality of worlds and their possible transformation in Logics of Worlds. I also discuss Badiou’s recent treatment of the 20th century project of formalization in The Century, arguing that Badiou’s analysis here offers useful terms for the political thought of the present situation. (shrink)

Conceived as the sequel to Alan Badiou's Being and Event, Logics of Worlds stands as one of the most important texts in contemporary thought. As a complex theory of worlds, the text has, for the most part, been misunderstood. Yet, through William Watkin's diligent and critical close--reading, he guides the reader through the Badiouan text, whilst demonstrating how Logics of Worlds is the essential book for anyone interested in existence, meaning and the potential for radical change.

Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of analysis of the social relation called ‘capital’ in his work can also be (...) investigated by means of a detour into the economic writings of theUnion des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste, the political organisation in which Badiou played a leading rôle throughout the 1970s in particular. By excavating this theoretical work of the 1970s, we can identify more precisely the historical and political reasons behind Badiou’s ambiguous relation to Marx and specifically to Marx’s systematic grasp of the logic of capital. This excavation will consequently lead us to a reflection on the limits and openings in Badiou’s thought for the Marxian critique of political economy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Where Being and Event was a book of meta-ontology, demonstrating how things be, Alain Badiou tells us that Logics of Worlds is an objective phenomenology demonstrating how (and what) things do. As such, it should also be considered a book about power: how objects function in their worlds, how change is possible, and what the event does to worlds and the objects in them. Attending to this, this article shows two conflicting forms of power emerge in Logics (...) of Worlds, the power of appearance and the power of change. In this article, the author argues their incommensurability suggests an overall failure of a consistent account of power from Badiou. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Logic of the SiteAlain Badiou (bio)Translated by Steve Corcoran (bio) and Bruno Bosteels (bio)The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of the CommuneTake any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this world—whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this world—is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that (...) happens to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance.Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singularity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself.We will ask: can we give a more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site?Let us consider the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim government of bourgeois "Republicans" capitulates to Bismarck's Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"—very comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal enemy)—it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by a frightened rural world, an assembly that sits in Bordeaux.Led by Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition. The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National Guard, battalions [End Page 141] that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of Paris—Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth.Thus we have a divided world whose logical organization—what in philosophical jargon could be called its transcendental organisation—reconciles intensities of political existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria. Concerning the representative, electoral, and legal dispositions, one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance, political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the International, local military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this world, which had been separated and disbanded [délié] owing to the war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the inexistent aspect [l'inexistant propre] of the term "political capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The government receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these reprobates." First up then, an imperative task, and a seemingly easy one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military committees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will make... (shrink)

If it is reasonable to hope that the current moment in philosophy may ultimately represent one of transition, from the divided remnants of the still enduring "split" between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy to some form (or forms) of twenty-first century philosophy that is no longer recognizably either (or is both), it seems likely as well that the thought and work of Alain Badiou can play a key role in articulating this much needed transition. One of the central innovations of Badiou's (...) work is that it uses the kind of rigorous formalism characteristic of much good analytic philosophy in its attempt to think through some of the main problems of ontology, metaphysics and political theory that have troubled continental philosophers over the course of the twentieth century. Both in Badiou's 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event and its new sequel, Logics of Worlds , the result is a kind of paradoxical formalism of the limits of formalism itself, striking a sometimes uneasy balance between the inveterate tendency of analytic thought to seek formal solutions for theoretical problems of epistemology and metaphysics, and that of continental thought to seek the solution to what are seen as more-than-theoretical problems of social and political praxis in the kinds of liberation that may occur outside the "closed" regime of all that is calculable or tractable by formal systems. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the points of confluence and dissonance in Jan Patočka and Louis Althusser’s respective theories of the idea of modern science, focusing on two texts from 1965, Patočka’s “Conférences de Louvain” and Althusser’s Lire le Capital. I argue that while Patočka’s diagnosis—which he shares with Husserl—of the “abyss” lying between the empty schematism of modern scientific formalization and an engaged concern for the přirození svět or “natural world” (broadly analogous to Husserl’s Lebenswelt) remains a variously inflected (...) constant in his thought, Althusser’s reading of Capital offers an objective correction or supplement to Patočka’s diagnosis. In this view, it is Reading Capital that first presents Marx’s Capital as a scientifically precise yet historically and socially determined and “concerned” (to use Patočka’s term) logical formalization of the contemporary, capitalist world. While Patočka’s few passing references to the young Marx throughout his kompletní dílo uniformly present the latter as a thinker of the post-Hegelian humanism of labour and productive subjectivity, I argue following Althusser and Alain Badiou that in Capital, Marx constructs an asubjective science of the necessary forms of appearance of all things in a historically specific world, a logical and scientific formalization of the historically specific “life world” Marx defines as the capitalist social form. (shrink)

Hybrid languages are expansions of propositional modal languages which can refer to worlds. The use of strong hybrid languages dates back to at least [Pri67], but recent work has focussed on a more constrained system called $\mathscr{H}$. We show in detail that $\mathscr{H}$ is modally natural. We begin by studying its expressivity, and provide model theoretic characterizations and a syntactic characterization. The key result to emerge is that $\mathscr{H}$ corresponds to the fragment of first-order logic which is invariant for (...) generated submodels. We then show that $\mathscr{H}$ enjoys interpolation, provide counterexamples for its finite variable fragments, and show that weak interpolation holds for the sublanguage $\mathscr{H}$. Finally, we provide complexity results for $\mathscr{H}$ and other fragments and variants, and sharpen known undecidability results for $\mathscr{H}$. (shrink)

Si no es posible comprender el desarrollo de El Capital sin conocer la Ciencia de la lógica, se busca trazar los lineamientos generales para alcanzar dicha comprensión. En seis tesis se ponen de relieve algunos aspectos importantes del pensamiento de Marx que han sido poco tratados, y se dialoga con la tradición marxista para señalar ciertos equívocos y resaltar algunas interpretaciones. Esto permite ofrecer un nuevo cuadro para entender la actitud crítica que adopta el "último" Marx frente a la dialéctica (...) de su maestro. Because it is not possible to comprehend Capital without knowing the Science of Logic, this article aims to chart some general guidelines to reach such an understanding. In six thesis, I highlight some important aspects of Marx's thought that have been little treated and dialog with the Marxist tradition to indicate certain equivocations and highlight some interpretations. This offers a new framework to understand the critical attitude that the "mature" Marx adopted regarding his teacher's dialect. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on Alain Badiou’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Jacques Lacan and highlight his conceptual points of divergence with the psychoanalyst. I elaborate on Badiou’s distinction between philosophy, antiphilosophy, and sophistry as well as the notions of sense, ab-sense, and non-sense that he proposed in the book There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan as well as in his seminar on Lacan. Unlike Lacan, who affirmed that philosophy is subject to the fantasy of (...) the One, Badiou claimed that the One exists merely as a result of an operation of counting. In this manner, he contested Lacan’s conviction that philosophy forecloses the real. I argue that Badiou’s main point of divergence with Lacan is centred on the notion of the subject and on the localization of the void in relation to the subject. I also touch upon philosophy’s relation to the symbolic, namely its ability to raise powerlessness to logical impossibility. (shrink)

We are now observing a most notable anniversary: a century and a half since the birth of Karl Marx, the great founder of Marxist theory and the ideologist of the proletariat. Our present meeting virtually coincides with another date of great significance. The first thousand copies of Marx's immortal Capital appeared in Hamburg a hundred years ago, in September 1867. No other book has exercised as deep-going and ever-widening an influence on various aspects of the mental and practical activity of (...) men as this great work of theory. The influence of Capital on methodological thought, too, has been exceptionally great. It is precisely through the prism of the ideas of this classical piece of writing that the methodological and logical notions contained in the prior and subsequent writings of Marx and Engels can be understood most completely and employed to build a theory of knowledge. Capital is of immense significance to the further development of dialectical logic in our own day and for working out cardinal problems of epistemology. Emphasizing the exceptional significance to philosophy and logic of Marx's principal scientific work, Lenin wrote: "If Marx did not leave us a Logic, he did leave us the logic of Capital, something that should be utilized to the full in the matter at hand.". (shrink)

Despite the general acceptance of Hegel's importance for Marx, virtually no one has paid sufficient attention to Marx's youthful critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Even Alfred Schmidt, whose work refers to the Naturphilosophie most frequently, underestimates its importance in the formulation of Marx's own materialist philosophy of nature and comes close to replicating the very Hegelian views that Marx is attacking. Yet the critique of the Naturphilosophie in Marx's Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts foreshadows Marx's later stated intention in (...) Capital to turn Hegel right-side up. It affirms not only a theory of the ontological reality of the material world, but a dialectics of nature whose importance for Marx extends from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital. Marx' s Naturphilosophie criticizes Hegel's replacement of natural history with a Philosophy of Nature derived from logical categories. It affirms Engels' later view that natural history should be restored by discovering dialectics in nature rather than imposing dialectics on it. (shrink)

An accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this brief conversational book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon all the major concepts of Badiou's philosophy and (...) illustrates them with fitting examples. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier. (shrink)

In a step-by-step progression through Marx's three volume work, discovers a systematic theory of socio-economic categories ordered according to the dialectical logic derived from Hegel.

In Mathematics of the Transcendental, Alain Badiou painstakingly works through the pertinent aspects of Category Theory, demonstrating their internal logic and veracity, their derivation and distinction from Set Theory, and the 'thinking of being'. In doing so he sets out the basic onto-logical requirements of his greater and transcendental logics as articulated in his magnum opus, Logics of Worlds. This important book combines both his elaboration of the disjunctive synthesis between ontology and onto-logy (the discourses of being (...) as such and being-appearing) from the perspective of Category Theory and the categorial basis of his philosophical conception of 'being there'. Hitherto unpublished in either French or English, Mathematics of the Transcendental provides Badiou's readers with a much-needed complete elaboration of his understanding and use of Category Theory. The book is an essential aid to understanding the mathematical and logical basis of his theory of appearing as elaborated in Logics of Worlds and other works and is essential reading for his many followers. (shrink)

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of “the present.” In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one’s own time—that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence. Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou’s seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of (...) the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future. Featuring some of the philosopher’s most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou’s thought. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the (...) ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

The fact that statements about "nothing" are, or are always equivalent to, a universal statement raises the question of a non-universalizable, non-completable nothing. Lacan’s pas-tout is an attempt to logically capture this incompleteness that can never be completed. While the pas-tout is relevant to the field of sexuation, its logic can be considered independent of it. This logic is, of course, a "deviant" logic, and for this reason raises questions about how it is to be interpreted. Alain (...) Badiou criticizes Lacan for adopting a pre-Cantorian attitude towards the infinite and for advocating the strictures of intuitionism. I argue that Lacan is not an intuitionist but a constructivist about mathematics. I also consider Jacques-Alain Miller’s suggestion that Lacan’s pastout can be considered a variant of the Aristotelian negative particular statement, "Not all As are B" or "Not every A is B". (shrink)

Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought – present in politics and logic – meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgen-stein it is the spontaneity of concept-formation that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reason” and through (...) performative enactments makes visible unexpected places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency”. Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call in the following paragraphs self-proclaimed logics of scission. (shrink)

Alain Badiou is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. His ground-breaking philosophy is based on a creative reading of set theory, offering a new understanding of what it means to be human by promoting an 'intelligence of change'. Badiou's philosophical system makes our capacity for revolution and novelty central to who we are, and develops an ethical position that aims to make us less anxious about this very capacity. This book presents a comprehensive and engaging account of (...) Badiou's philosophy, including an in-depth discussion of _The Theory of the Subject_, _Being and Event_ and _Logics of Worlds_. In a clear and careful analysis, Ed Pluth considers exactly how Badiou's theoretical 'anti-humanism' is linked up to what is, for all intents and purposes, a practical humanism. Central to this is an account of Badiou’s theory of the subject, and his attempt to develop an 'ethic of truths'. The role of set theory, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Badiou's philosophy is also given close attention. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This is a work of historical critical exegesis. It aims to establish the influence of the Science of Logic (SL) of G.W.F. Hegel on the Grundrisse of Karl Marx. It is the first work in the history of Marx Studies to demonstrate that the Hegelian logic guided Marx's doctrinal development, and that the ordering of the logical categories in the SL is reflected in the ordering of economic categories in the Grundrisse.

Smith reads Marx's Capital as "a systematic theory of economic categories constructed according to a dialectical logic". He argues that the influence of Hegel's Logic on the architectonic plan of Capital is "the one central area that has yet to be explored adequately" in the oft-tilled field of Hegel's influence on Marx.

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. (shrink)

We comment on the last chapter of Henrich where the author offers a ‘key’ to Hegel’s Logic focusing on the problem of the passage from self-reference to determination in the beginning of the Logic. We argue that what he offers as a ‘key’ is actually a reduction of Hegel to the logic of understanding from the point of view of an autonomous Ego; consequently, he excludes dialectics. Contrarily, we present Hegel’s own solution, eliciting the remark where he (...) shows that the proposition “Being and Nothing are the same” negates itself insofar as it is uttered and reflected on the Other’s understanding. We conjecture that this remark offers a privileged point from which to consider the connection Hegel-Lacan, provided we recognize the Absolute in Hegel as the big Other in Lacan. We suggest that the dialectical identity of identity and difference is actually an operation in the Agora and that the Hegel-Marx-Lacan theory can be properly denominated dialectical materialism. We also offer an answer to Žižek’s question of how a “neutral medium of designation” can emerge within a “life-world practice” or out of a “universe of matter. (shrink)

The beginning of Marx’s Capital has references to Hegel’s Logic of Being. From the individual commodity considered in isolation, Marx derives the value form as the germ cell of capitalist society. Marx’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic posits the value form as a spectral objectivity that constitutes the real abstraction specific to capitalism. As the most abstract expression of capital, it rules unconsciously the totality of social praxis as an absolute fetish. Value arises from a double mystification: the (...) reification of capitalist social relations of production in an objective abstract form, and its representation in concrete objects, as commodities and money in circulation. Value, as the real abstraction of capitalist social relations of production, is the disjunctive synthesis between the despotic command of capital in production and the reciprocity of exchange in circulation. In the final chapter on primitive accumulation, Marx identifies its historical genesis in the dispossession of the commons, which, by separating the subjective from the objective conditions of production, gives rise to the capital-wage labour relation. (shrink)

The author shows that Marx saw himself as the creator of a science of history rather than a philosopher, economist, or sociologist. He elucidates Marx's method as a fusion of logical and historical analysis. He explains Marx's concepts of practice and social being, alienation and freedom, and social and socioeconomic formation. Finally, he discusses Marx's ideas about free and labor time.

Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex butunitarysocio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves the spatial-territorial extension of the domain of modern value relations, embodied in fully-capitalist (...) money. Departing from the development of coinage in ancient Greece, the article proceeds to identify the 1690s in Britain as the decisive moment in the emergence of a new and distinctively capitalist form of (world) money, institutionally based upon the Bank of England, in which state debt was thoroughly integrated with private financial markets. The crucial role of the Bank of England in this new monetary system is shown to have pivoted on its capacities to finance Britain’s inter-colonial wars. Colonialism, war, slavery and dispossession underline the omnipresence of ‘blood and dirt’ (Marx) in the development and reproduction of capitalist impersonal power as expressed in world money. Undoing the impersonal power characteristic of bourgeois money thus entails undoing the economic dispossession of the labouring poor, which forms the basis of their ‘possession’ by capital. (shrink)

We show that every modal logic (with arbitrary many modalities of arbitrary arity) can be seen as a multi-dimensional modal logic in the sense of Venema. This result shows that we can give every modal logic a uniform "concrete" semantics, as advocated by Henkin et al. This can also be obtained using the unravelling method described by de Rijke. The advantage of our construction is that the obtained class of frames is easily seen to be elementary and (...) that the worlds have a more uniform character. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s theory of discipline condenses many important theoretical tools that he developed throughout his long encounter with various philosophical and political milieus from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, when he wrote his magnum opus _Being and Event_. Through this vast terrain, Badiou expressed seemingly different commitments: from logic and the epistemology of science in the late 1960s and politics during the 1970s, to ontology and mathematics in the 1980s, which has continued to this time. However, a (...) close reading of his major works during this period reveals an internal thread of thought that runs between them, which I have named discipline. In other words, discipline is the framework within which we can reconstruct Badiou’s main ideas as part of a continuous work (during the stated period) that not only reveals the internal coherence of his overall thought over the course of time, within which he showed different and seemingly unrelated commitments, but also gives us a powerful tool to understand the key concepts of his philosophy, such as the procedures of truth, ontology, phenomenology, and his commitment to axiomatic thinking. In this essay we aim to examine the concept of the subject in relation to the theory of discipline. We will do so by examining Badiou’s encounter with two crucial aspects of the theory of the subject discussed by Lacan: the Cartesian _cogito_ and the relation of the subject to the mathematical infinite. (shrink)

Craig's interpolation lemma (if φ → ψ is valid, then φ → θ and θ → ψ are valid, for θ a formula constructed using only primitive symbols which occur both in φ and ψ) fails for many propositional and first order modal logics. The interpolation property is often regarded as a sign of well-matched syntax and semantics. Hybrid logicians claim that modal logic is missing important syntactic machinery, namely tools for referring to worlds, and that adding such (...) machinery solves many technical problems. The paper presents strong evidence for this claim by defining interpolation algorithms for both propositional and first order hybrid logic. These algorithms produce interpolants for the hybrid logic of every elementary class of frames satisfying the property that a frame is in the class if and only if all its point-generated subframes are in the class. In addition, on the class of all frames, the basic algorithm is conservative: on purely modal input it computes interpolants in which the hybrid syntactic machinery does not occur. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s treatment of objects in Logics of Worlds is both rich and highly technical, though its terminological challenges are softened by his use of illuminating examples. This article takes a twofold approach to the topic. In a first sense, the theory of objects developed in Logics of Worlds by way of an imagined protest at the Place de la République in Paris exhibits two questionable aspects: (1) the notion that the object is a bundle of qualities (found (...) proverbially in Hume, but also in Kant’s “transcendental object=X”), and (2) the ultimately idealist assumption of a possible isomorphy between appearance and reality. But in a second sense, Badiou’s transcendental account of worlds leads him to a fascinating theory of exemplary entities, one that is immune to the critiques of onto-theology made by Heidegger and Derrida. This can be found in his account of the “transcendental functor” in Alexander the Great’s decisive victory over Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C.E. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy and its conditions. The affirmation “mathematics is ontology”, which I posited thirty years ago, has certain inconveniences. In this article, I present six varying possibilities for ontology. My own philosophical decision was to proclaim that being is a pure multiplicity, without the One and without any specific attribute such as “matter” or “spirit”. This movement of thought brought me to study the mathematical condition of philosophy and to search for a rigorous structuration of (...) my speculative decision within the field of mathematics. However, my initial postulate that “Being is the multiplicity without the One” is not a mathematical but a philosophical statement. This paper concludes with a presentation of the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. (shrink)

This book attempts to articulate the role of Hegelian dialectical logic in Marx’s Capital and to defend Marx against certain Hegelian critics, most notably Klaus Hartmann, who has systematically criticized Marx’s theory of capitalism, and Richard Winfield. According to Smith, the role of dialectical logic in Marx’s Capital has been underappreciated and little explored, which deals throughout with Marx’s use of Hegel’s dialectical logic in the critique of political economy). Moreover, Smith is concerned with establishing why Marx (...) “needed” to employ dialectical logic and the full extent of the Hegelian legacy here. We are told, initially, that dialectical logic was important for Marx in order to establish his categories of reflection, to develop his theory of fetishism, to present strong claims of necessity, and to ground revolutionary politics. These issues are addressed at various places in the book. (shrink)

Building on discussions originating in post-humanism, the non-philosophy of François Laruelle, and the science of 'species being of humanity' stemming from Marx's critique of philosophy, Katerina Kolozova proposes a radical consideration of capitalism's economic exploitation of life. This book uses François Laruelle's work to think through questions of 'practical ethics' and bring the abstract tools of Laruelle's non-philosophy into conversation with other critical methods in the humanities. Kolozova centres the question of the animal at the very heart of what it (...) means for us as human beings to think and act in the world, and the mistreatment of animality that underpins the logic of capitalism. (shrink)

This paper reads Marx’s distinction between the method of inquiry and presentation as distinct and Marxist pedagogical logics that take the form of learning and studying. After articulating the differences and their current conceptualizations in educational theory, I turn to different interpretations of the Grundrisse and Capital. While I note the differences, I maintain these result from Marx’s alternation between learning and studying, to the different weights Marx gives to both. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the (...) precise logics of capital, of its contradictions, and of how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t do this because no one can fully delineate and learn about capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. I show how readings of both books are products and productive of Marx’s own pedagogical constellation through their content and form of presentation. The argument is that this is a political and constellational pedagogy that’s contingent and singular rather than resolvable and unifiable. (shrink)

What I want to focus on in this paper is the question of the connection between the positivism of the Vienna Circle — the "scientific conception of the world" — and politics. The Vienna Circle will be considered first ''als soziale Bewegung'' and second from the point of view of "Sozialforschung". The paper is a case study in the problem of the relation of a theory to practice, and more particularly, of the relation of a technical epistemological and methodological theory (...) of science to social practice. The critical assessment of the nature of the Vienna Circle as a social movement starts from the consideration of the views of Otto Neurath; and concludes with some theses about the failure of this social movement precisely as it relates to the logical positivist and logical empiricist theory of science, and to its scientific conception of the world. (shrink)

In his second book on being and event, Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou describes Plato’s late dialogue, The Sophist as “one of the first transcendental inquiries in the history of thought”. In this dialogue, Plato introduces what he calls the Idea of the Other, the possibility of a being of non-being, an inevitable break with the Parmenidean tradition. However, according to Badiou, Plato fails to provide an example of how this Idea of the Other can manifest itself or be (...) effective in a world, or in other words, appear. This paper argues that not only there is such an example in Plato’s Sophist, namely, the phantasma, but also that it can be strongly related to Badiou’s philosophical system. (shrink)