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)

The publication of _Reading Capital_—by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière—in 1965 marked a key intervention in Marxist philosophy and critical theory, bringing forth a stunning array of concepts that continue to inspire philosophical reflection of the highest magnitude. _The Concept in Crisis_ reconsiders the volume’s reading of Marx and renews its call for a critique of capitalism and culture for the twenty-first century. The contributors—who include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and Fernanda Navarro—interrogate Althusser's contributions (...) in particular within the context of what is surely the most famous collective reading of Marx ever undertaken. Among other topics, they offer a symptomatic critique of Althusser; consider his writing as a materialist production of knowledge; analyze the volume’s conceptualization of value and crisis; examine how leftist Latin American leaders like Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos engaged with Althusser and _Reading Capital_; and draw out the volume's implications and use for feminist theory and praxis. Retrieving the inspiration that drove Althusser's reinterpretation of Marx, _The Concept in Crisis_ explains why _Reading Capital_'s revolutionary inflection retains its critical appeal, prompting readers to reconsider Marx's relevance in an era of neoliberal capitalism. Contributors. Emily Apter, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Adrian Johnston, Warren Montag, Fernanda Navarro, Nick Nesbitt, Knox Peden, Nina Power, Robert J. C. Young. (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)

This article raises a series of points of confluence between Badiou’s philosophy and that of Bernard Bolzano, whom Badiou has identified as a historical predecessor but never directly engaged. These points include their respective critiques of Kant and Hegel, as well as their various concepts of sets, platonist realism, axiomatisation, the infinite, adequate demonstration, structure, and mathematics as the adequate language of being.

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)

Theodor W. Adorno's writings on jazz call out endlessly for interpretation. The observations of this master of the rhetorical and philosophical paradox seem to have lived on beyond their allotted time—a time perhaps delimited by his reliance upon Winthrop Seargeant's Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (1938) and the term “bebop,” whose hollow ringing deforms the Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1961).1 Adorno perversely denies jazz the most fundamental insight of his aesthetic theory: that “art at every point participates in concepts.” (...) Instead, he dismisses it as a pure instantiation of the culture industry.2 His thought rigidifies whenever he returns to…. (shrink)