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 volume brings together eighteen articles which examine erôs as an emotion in ancient Greek culture. Taking into account all important thinking about the nature of erôs from the eighth century BCE to the third century CE, it covers a very broad range of sources and theoretical approaches, both in the chronological and the generic sense.

Situates Lacan’s theory of the subject within contemporary philosophical debates over freedom and agency.

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue justice in (...) a fallen world."--Amazon.com. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including 'profit with purpose' businesses such as co-operatives, this short guide reveals how to make a success of values. By unpacking what we mean by values and ethics, and setting out a series of practical approaches, Ed Mayo presents how values can become a natural part of commercial life. This book identifies both the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organization, from a bank that responds to (...) an ethical crisis to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality. The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down, or that you would expect. There is no right or wrong set of values, but there is power and potential in making the most of the values that are right for the business you are in. By reading Values: How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be." -- Back cover. (shrink)

This paper considers the status of both the natural real and thinking in transcendental or structural materialisms, and questions whether the relationship between thinking and being in such philosophies can really be considered dialectical or not. Looking at the recent work of Slavoj Žižek, but with an eye to work being done by thinkers such as Brassier, Johnston, and Meillassoux as well, I consider what is said about quantum physics in some of Žižek’s recent books, and argue that it is (...) difficult to see how any version of the natural real – quantum or not – can have a status in a dialectical philosophy that does not end up at least implicitly giving ordinary human experience and thought a de-realized or ontologically degraded status, in a manner that is in fact very un-dialectical. The sciences basically require a reductionist perspective, such that it is hard to argue that there is any vigorous relationship between thinking and being in them. There is much about human experience and thinking that does need to be de-realized, of course. Hegelian philosophy and Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis have always done an excellent job of that. (shrink)

The theory of life that Badiou proposes at the end of Logics of Worlds is considered in this paper as a retooling of the old idea that the human is an exception in the order of things. What distinguishes Badiou’s account of the human from others though is the fact that it posits the human not as an exception from other animals, nor as an exception to ordinary life, but an exception that is other to the individual as such. The (...) way in which Alexandre Kojève framed the human in his reading of Hegel is used to establish the basic philosophical grammar for Badiou’s thinking about the human. What Badiou calls “democratic materialism” – his philosophical nemesis – is also considered from the perspective of that grammar. (shrink)

Recent discussions of the notion of the act in Lacan and Žižek have made the act out to be something like a stand in for the old idea of freedom. And so, the debate tends to be about whether acts are spontaneous or not, whether they result from decisions coming from a conscious subject or not, and what relation acts have to the circumstances that precede them. But much of this debate may be a red herring. I will be taking (...) the view here that, despite important similarities, the major difference between Badiou and Žižek on this point can be traced back to their differing views on the subject. By thinking the subject as a void, or as negative, Žižek’s subject looks more like a decisionist, even Sartrean subject. Badiou’s subject seems more fully post-phenomenological, and this difference has an important effect on how the act is conceived in his work.How Badiou’s subject fits within a psychoanalytic perspective is something I will explore in my second part. Badiou’s theory seems to have taken a psychoanalytic and Lacanian perspective very much to heart when thinking about the act. I will explain how this is so by using two models for an act coming from two different artistic practices: the surrealist practice of automatic writing, which I will compare to psychoanalytic free association, and the practice that Marcel Duchamp dubbed “over-censorship,” which I will compare to “working-through”. Each gives us a different model for the production of truth, and, in line with Badiou’s call to become the “pitiless censors of ourselves,” I argue that Duchamp’s technique has quite a bit to teach us about the structure of an act. It also helps to shed light on some aspects of Žižek’s view. (shrink)

If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of (...) such an approach to the Tractatus (TLP). But he also introduces some novel and interesting lines of criticism that merit serious attention. Foremost among the latter is White's treatment (in Section III of his paper) of three engaging examples that he sees as making trouble for resolute readers, and for their opposition to the standard idea that the lesson of the Tractatrrs could consist in its communicating, and our grasping, ineffable insights by way of its nonsense-sentences. (shrink)

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a (...) political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity" - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone. CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, "A Brief History of Geotrauma" - McKenzie Wark, "An Inhuman Fiction of Forces" - Benjamin H. Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia" - Alisa Andrasek, "Dustism" - Zach Blas, "Queerness, Openness" - Melanie Doherty, "Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious" - Anthony Sciscione, "Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space'" - Kate Marshall, "Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)" - Alexander R. Galloway, "What is a Hermeneutic Light?" - Eugene Thacker, "Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness" - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, "Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War" - Ben Woodard, "The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics" - Ed Keller, "...Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain..." - Lionel Maunz, "Receipt of Malice" - Öykü Tekten, "Symposium Photographs" - Reza Negarestani, "Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone". (shrink)

[Przekład] Tekst niniejszy jest wprowadzeniem do książki Eda Cohena A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Autor bada, w jaki sposób immunologia wpływa na postrzeganie tak ciała ludzkiego, jak i bytów politycznych, ukazując współczesne konceptualizacje tych zjawisk jako wzajemnie od siebie zależne. Zastosowane ujęcie historyczne pozwala na prześledzenie historii metafory odporności w polityce i medycynie.

The Query is reasonable (First Order) Predicate Logic (PL:) is a ”Universal Grammar" for the languages of Elementary Arithmetic, Euclidean Geometry, Set Theory, Boolean Algebra, .... It defines their expressions, their semantic interpretations, and texts, called proofs, that syntactically characterize the boolean semantic entailment relation: P entails Q iff Q is true whenever P is.

In Research on Language and Computation, Co-editor with Alastair Butler (primary editor) and Jason Mattausch of the special issue. Vol: 5.1 Springer Verlag.

This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the authors reached a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the authors document wide divergences (...) among countries in all measures of subjective well-being, The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated. (shrink)

This Element introduces the notion of curatorial composing to account for certain musical practices that emerged from the 1960s as the founding concepts of music as an art - instituted in the modern era - were systematically dismantled. It raises the key question of how musical value and authority might be produced without recourse to an external principle, origin, transcendental framework, or other foundation. It argues that these practices do not dismiss the issue of value or simply relativise it but (...) shift the paradigm to a curatorial concern for composing public encounters and staging events. The Element shows that Lydia Goehr's elaboration of the work-concept provides a framework that was transformed by John Cage in his work from 0'00" (1962) onwards. The Element then introduces Heiner Goebbels' practice and focus on his role as Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale (2012-14), which it argues was an extension of his curatorial composing. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Everything Is Illuminated_, Richard Flanagan’s _Gould’s Book of Fish_, and Richard Powers’s _The Time of Our Singing _are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

2001. With Cecile Manorohanta. Oceanic Linguistics Vol 40 No 1: 67-85.

Four men in a cell in Rebibbia prison, Rome, awaiting trial on serious charges of subversion. One of them, the political thinker Antonio Negri, spends his days writing. Among his writings are twenty letters addressed to a young friend in France letters in which Negri reflects on his own personal development as a philosopher, theorist and political activist and analyses the events, activities and movements in which he has been involved. The letters recount an existential journey that links a rigorous (...) philosophical education with a powerful political passion, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Italy. Crucially, Negri recalls the pivotal moment in 1978 when the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades, and how the institutions then pinned that killing onto him and his associates. Published here for the first time, these letters offer a unique and invaluable insight into the factors that shaped the thinking of one of the most influential political theorists of our time and they document Negri’s role in the development of political movements like Autonomia. They are a vivid testimony to one man’s journey through the political upheavals and intellectual traditions of the late 20th century, in the course of which he produced a body of work that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on radical thought and politics around the world. (shrink)