In my dissertation, I made an argument that the decisionism of Badiou, Zizek, Laclau and other so-called 'post-Marxist' theorists is derived from an intra-theoretical debate amongst left-Heideggerians, specifically against the pervasive authenticity politics and existentialist politics of the time. I argue that Lacan's 'ontology of lack' was the alternative formula that enabled these thinkers to …
Continue reading "Whither the critique of political economy in post-Marxism?"
I have a new blog/essay up at the Critical Theory Research Network called "Obscure Subjects: Myth and Metapolitics on the alt-Right." Here is an overview: In this piece, I consider the syndicalist intellectual Georges Sorel and his influence on early 20th century fascism in France and Italy prior to the rise of the Nazis in …
Continue reading "Obscure Subjects: Myth and Metapolitics on the alt-Right"
The American Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson's latest article in the New Left Review, "Badiou and the French Tradition" (full PDF here) ends by noting the most important omissions Badiou makes throughout his oeuvre. I find Jameson's reading of Badiou highly contradictory and sloppy at times. Jameson gives us a reading of Badiou that takes …
Continue reading "Jameson on Badiou: Ships Passing in the Night"
Frank Ruda's For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism probes the question that has driven a number of interventions into Badiou's thought: what is the role of philosophy in non-evental or saturated times? Saturation is a state of atonality, a state in which the exception is not made actual. Saturation implies the end of a process or procedure of …
In his late Marxist work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre was pessimistic about revolutionary politics. He theorized the subject of history in the figure of the group in revolt, what he termed the 'fused group'. The fused group, through their acts of negation (revolt), develop a new interior, untranscedable position. In a Lacanian sense, Sartre's fused group is …
Continue reading "Badiou’s Revision of Sartre’s Fused Group"
How do we locate voluntarism in the political thought of Sylvain Lazarus and Alain Badiou? First, what do I mean by voluntarism. Two things mainly: voluntarism posits that consciousness declares antagonism, not that antagonism declares consciousness. Voluntarism posits that the possibility of political decisions and acts occurs from within the sphere of consciousness subtracted from capitalist time. It …
Continue reading "Time and Voluntarism in Badiou and Lazarus"
I have a new essay up at Heathwood Press as part of their special series on Crisis Capitalism and Creeping Fascism – Bigotry, Racism, and the Rise of the Right in the Age of Neoliberal Barbarism. Please support Heathwood Press, an important new publisher working to revive the project of critical theory for today. Here …
Continue reading "Elements of Islamophobia: The State, Class and Capital"
