Badiou

En nuestro tiempo de vínculos debilitados y exacerbación del individualismo, el amor aparece, muchas veces, como una mercancía más, que se elige o deshecha con liviandad. Debiéramos recobrar una concepción del amor vinculada al aprecio por la alteridad, por esa aventura que representa el esfuerzo del encuentro con el otro.

Love, as I try to develop in this essay, is not the ontological or ethical basis from which all other elements of society emerge, but it is tied to a social form that depends upon the categorial system of reproduction, which is the way in which love concretely exists under existing relations of production. Love, taken here as the sensual form of being social (which in turn depends upon reproduction), remains, accordingly, in distance from religious, romantic, anthropological or legal conceptions of love. Against such reductionisms we must maintain that love is a form of being social in which the sensual life is as complex as the social world, and not an abstraction from the latter. As Marx states in The Holy Family: love “cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals” (MEW 2, 23). Love, then, is tied to real individuals and cannot be seen in an ahistorical fashion, though it needs to be grasped in its specific, i.e., its categorial form. I will first present reflections on love in pre-Marxian terms, as Marx’s break with essentialist conceptions of love depends upon his critique of Feuerbach; I will then reconstruct Marx’s early philosophy of love as a philosophy of sensuality, expanding this position by taking the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser) into account, before I finish with contrasting the social-material theory of love with what I conceive as regressive position in recent political philosophy, such as Negri’s and Badiou’s philosophies of love.

En este artículo realizamos un análisis de la última parte de la obra de Gabriela Liffschitz. En ella, la escritora y fotógrafa argentina elabora poéticamente una experiencia de cáncer de mama. Aquí, creemos, en primer lugar, que la enfermedad es vivida y entendida como un "acontecimiento", de acuerdo a los desarrollos teóricos de este concepto de autores como Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida o Alain Badiou. En segundo lugar, creemos que este hecho -la fidelidad al acontecimiento del cáncer- es el que habilita a la autora a construir una posición de resistencia frente a los dispositivos biomédicos y biopolíticos contemporáneos. Desde esta posición, en tercer lugar, Liffschitz impugna el efecto de individuación de dichos dispositivos y pone en juego una forma de "ser-en-común" que hace más habitable su vida y su enfermedad.

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.

Previously 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 vital 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.

This is the English version of "El tungsteno: La fidelidad de César Vallejo y Alain Badiou al Acontecimiento de la Revolución de Octubre" forthcoming from A/Contracorriente in May of 2016. It was originally presented as “Tungsten and César Vallejo's Fidelity to the Event of Marxism for Latin America.” Visions of History and Politics. International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL). University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Regina, Canada. May 27, 2010.

Tanulmányomban Alain Badiou egyik szemináriumi előadásának írott verziója alapján fogalmazok meg néhány gondolatot a halál, a végesség problémájáról. Először röviden megvizsgálom Heidegger, Sartre és Badiou halálfelfogásának hasonlóságait és különbségeit, majd a Badiou által a végességhez kapcsolt négy fogalmat értelmezve írok a halál mibenlétéről. A négy alapvető fogalom: identitás, ismétlés, szükségszerűség és Isten. Munkámban főként az identitás és a halál összefüggéseit tárgyalom. A következő kérdésre keresem a választ elsősorban: mit jelent a halálhoz való saját viszony kialakítása?

Fundamental to Badiou’s so-called mature philosophy is his declaration in Being and Event that ‘mathematics is ontology’. Everything that follows from this assertion—from the structure of situations and their states all the way to events and the subjects and truths they can engender—must be understood as the carefully drawn out consequences of this properly philosophical decision. One could even argue—such is the rigor with which Badiou constructs Being and Event—those who reject Badiou’s core philosophy do so foremost because they reject his initial thesis on the equivalence of mathematics and ontology. For if this thesis is unfounded, so too is Badiou’s entire philosophy. Conversely, in accepting the equivalence of mathematics and ontology it is hard to avoid its manifold ramifications, meticulously laid out in Being and Event and subsequent works.

In his new book MÉTAPHYSIQUE DU BONHEUR RÉEL ("Metaphysics of Real Happiness", 2015 ), Alain Badiou asserts and attempts to elucidate the relation between real happiness and the philosophical life, between the cultivation of a happy life and the search for truth. He tells us from the beginning that for him the link between philosophy and happiness is an existential necessity.

The purpose of this work is to comprehend the importance and scope of chance in the poetry of Mallarmé. In order to do that, we will proceed according to a three-pronged approach; recompose the political, poetic and philosophical context that made possible the emergence and establishment of chance as an event both revolutionary, creative and conceptual. Since Baudelaire, poetry sings the failed revolutions, but willing to preserve the desire for a different world. Chance in this context is the unpredictable bursts, lightning and transient of a desire that can not find its place within the social life, to keep alive and vivid the dream of a different world, poetry must: provide evidence that its action, even restricted, counts; make last chance doomed to fade, constituting a space where it can remain, multiply itself and thus find the consistency to remain.  Prolonging a contingency that creates novelty is the task that Mallarmé attributes to his poetry.  Philosophically, this approach requires a radical critique of reason and representation. In this context, Mallarmé has not only announced chance, but he sought to discover the logic of what escapes from reason composing a work capable of making real, visible and intelligible, the unpredictable and inexhaustible power that chance grips.

El conjunto de trabajos contenidos en el presente libro, producidos entre el 2006 y el 2013, constituyen una provocativa propuesta discursiva desde la cual reconstruir críticamente al Derecho actual y repensarlo o, mejor aún, traspasarlo desde ese sentido alternativo de normatividad societal que se va desplegando por doquier más allá de los límites impuestos por la forma-jurídica y el modo estadocéntrico de regulación social.

Naturalizing Badiou offers a naturalist critique and revision of Alain Badiou's philosophy. It argues against some core elements of his systematic philosophy, considering them unacceptable for the naturalist philosopher. At the same time, however, it highlights how Badiou's broader and ambitious metaphilosophical commitments can fruitfully supplement the orthodox naturalism grounding some contemporary stances in the philosophy of science. This goal is pursued through staging an encounter of Badiou's mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. Targeting Badiou's inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, the book articulates a particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to. It then presents a creative fusion of Badiou's attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a 'matherialism' that unites the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter.

Çeviren: Murat Erşen
Şairleri ve müzisyenleri dinlemek gerekir, sonluluğumuzun çekiciliğinde yaşamak gerekir, rüzgarla, denizle, oyunlarla, kahkahalarla, eğlencelerle, danslarla; ama zaman zaman da filozofları ve matematikçileri dinlemek ve düşüncemizi sonsuza ulaşmak için bir yay gibi germek gerekir. Çünkü bu sonsuza, tam da Cantor'un "sonsuz bir küme, sonsuz bir sayı olan omega vardır" dediği gibi, düşünce yoluyla bir hedefe varırcasına erişiriz. Bu ikisine; sonlunun sevincine ve sonsuzun gücüne sahip olursak, mutluluğa kavuşacağımıza inanıyorum. Mutluluk her zaman, sonlu ve de sonsuz olan bir şeydir.


Sayfa Sayısı: 61
Baskı Yılı: 2012
Dili: Türkçe
Yayınevi: Monokl

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

''Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt'' explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called ''the passion of his life.'' I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt's relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt's relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

My path through the book is multiple, and comprises the following aspects: 1) a conceptual path centred on philosophical pluralism and on the book's concepts concerning the multiple types of infinites; 2) a poetic path centred on the movements of descent into the hell of the finitude of the waste product cut off from infinity, of purgation, and of ascension to Paradise (the paradise of the Absolute, or " Cantor's paradise "), and finally the re-descent into the finitude of the work " touched " by the infinite; 3) a linguistic path centred on the question of the type of language that is the most appropriate for speaking of our world and our life – Alain Badiou demonstrates the depth and fecundity of a philosophical language drawn from the mathematics of the higher infinite; 4) a contextual path centred on a comparison of Badiou's rigorous mathematically-based analysis and division of the concept of the infinite with Deleuze's more intuitive and poetic conceptions of the infinite in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?; 5) a subjective path centred on what the book can change both in our relation to the infinite and in the reader's philosophical unconscious.

Il s'agit de la séance du 17 mars 1987 du séminaire de Badiou consacré à Heidegger. Badiou annonce, en commençant cette séance, qu'elle « sera consacrée à une récapitulation synthétique serrée ». Or, en lieu et place d'une récapitulation de sa lecture de Heidegger, nous découvrons ici, « sous forme de 11 thèses enchaînées les unes aux autres », sa conception de ce qu'est la philosophie. C'est en réalité le cœur du séminaire, ce que Badiou tenait par-dessus tout à expliquer.  Ces 11 thèses sont ainsi structurées :
- Les 8 premières sont présentées comme une description de ce qu’est ou doit être la philosophie, d’une manière générale, pour n’importe quel philosophe et en tout temps, en particulier pour Heidegger et pour Badiou,
- La 9ième est censée récapituler « la position de Heidegger au regard des hypothèses précédentes », c’est-à-dire au regard de ce qu’est la philosophie,
- La 10ième est la « contraposition [de Badiou] au dispositif heideggérien »,
- La 11ième annonce qu’en philosophie « Il faut commencer par la question de l’un ».

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

Abstract:  How to understand Primordial Sociality and its emergence philosophically in relation to Fundamental Ontology and Existentialism. Primordial Sociality is based on Wild Being. This is distinguished from Existential Sociality based on the Emergent Meta-system. The various kinds of Being such as Pure, Process, and Hyper Being gives rise to different kinds of basic sociality which are Pure Sociality, Process Sociality, and Hyper Sociality prior to the arising of Wild Sociality that then appears on the surface of Ultra Sociality that is completely transcendent (height) or is represented by the utterly unconscious (depth). Wild Being is a surface phenomena of the expression of Sense differentiated from Nonsense. Wild Sociality appears within the Transcendental field as the intra-penetration of what Merleau-Ponty calls Tacit Cogitos.

Key Words:  Sociology, Social Theory, Social Philosophy, Social Metaphysics, Nature of Sociality, Wild Sociality, Existential Sociality

The philosophical positions of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek emerge in opposition to the deconstruction of the history of philosophy and to the corresponding rejection of the category of the subject. The subject becomes in their thought not a philosophical trap to be evaded but a political possibility to be realized. However, just as their embrace of the category of the subject distinguishes them from the theoretical landscape in which they exist, it is also an important point of divergence between their philosophical systems. Crucial to both such philosophical systems – and the distinct conceptions of the subject that emerges from them – is the significance of ruptures in the continuity of history. Badiou’s ‘event’ and Zizek’s ‘act’ name these ruptures. This article introduces and compares these respective approaches, drawing attention both to the important ways in which their thought diverges and to how Zizek’s system implicitly responds to the contradictions in Badiou’s.

The Heideggerian account of the ontotheological constitution of Western metaphysics has been extremely influential for contemporary philosophy of religion and for philosophical perspectives on theology and the divine. This paper introduces and contrasts two central strategies for approaching the question of the divine in a non- or post-ontotheological manner. The first and more established approach is that of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics and deconstruction, inspired by Heidegger’s suggestion of a “theology without the word ‘being’ ” and by his later notions of an “ultimate god” and of “divinities” as one of the four axes of the fourfold (Geviert). Here, the divine is no longer articulated in terms of the supreme or absolute being, but as one of the interdependent dimensions of finite and contextual meaningful presence. The more recent approach introduced by Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux dissociates itself from the Heideggerian hermeneutics of finitude and adopts mathematics as its basic ontological model. Rather than focusing on meaning and sense, Badiou and Meillassoux replace ontotheological metaphysics with materialist frameworks. With regard to the divine, this approach leads either to a contemporary version of atheism (Badiou) or to the reintroduction of a divine entity, but now a merely possible and contingent one (Meillassoux).

Der Beitrag bietet zunächst eine ausführliche genealogische Nachzeichnung des philosophischen Ereignis-Verständnisses beim späten Heidegger, in der Entfaltung des Werks von Emmanuel Levinas (insbes. im Konzept der Spur und der Alterität), sowie in den temporalen und politischen Konzepten bei Alain Badiou und Jacques Derrida. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird gezeigt, inwiefern diese philosophischen Analysen der Struktur von "Ereignis" geeignet sind, das monotheistische Verständnis von "Offenbarung" anhand der geschichtlich gewachsenen Eigenart der performativen Textualität der monotheistischen Schriften zu beschreiben und damit einen historischen Zugang und ein textuelles Kriterium für die nachträglichen spekulativen Zugänge zum Offenbarungsverständnis in den verschiedenen Systematischen Theologien zu gewinnen.

The international discussion of the communist hypothesis has quickly developed into a debate regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. This article argues that the stakes of this development become clearer when it is related to the central debates of the earlier alternative globalization movement. The article then explores some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party-form: the notion of the ‘compositional party’ of Italian operaismo, Lukács’s concepts of a ‘political subject’, and Gramsci’s ‘modern Prince.’ The modern Prince is argued to represent the type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary political movements.

Vor dem Hintergrund der so oft missverstandenen Rede vom "Tod des Subjekts" zeichnet der Beitrag das "andere" Subjektverständnis nach, das auf unterschiedliche Weise mit und in den Ansätzen von Jacques Derrida und Alain Badiou grundgelegt wird. Das "Neue" besteht dabei vor allem in der Erkenntnis der "Nachträglichkeit" der Subjektwerdung. Das in diesem Sinn nicht mehr "souveräne" Subjekt erhält seine Eigenständigkeit somit erst in der Formulierung und politischen Gestaltung eines nachträglichen Zeugnis-gebens von einem Ereignis bzw. einem Anspruch, der zum Handeln herausfodert.

What is the relationship between metaphysics and political revolution? Despite being two of the most widely discredited concepts in contemporary European philosophy, this chapter argues that we are witnessing the return of both in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Their return, however, is no mere repetition of the previous forms of classical metaphysics and modern revolution- defined by totality and the state. Rather, it is a differen- tial return: a return that changes something fundamental about these concepts and breathes into them a desperately needed new life. Many contemporary Eu- ropean philosophers have announced the "end of metaphysics" and the "death of philosophy." They have buried the ideas of metaphysics and revolution many years ago, but continue to pursue the endless task of vilifYing them- Jest their specters return from the grave.

On where the Cutting Edge of the Western Tradition might be found with respect to the development of Fundamental Ontology within Continental Philosophy

-- Key Words:  Continental Philosophy, Ways of Being, Fragmentation of Being, Time, Cutting Edge