Mehdi Belhaj Kacem is a highly enigmatic thinker: an autodidact in the history of philosophy, a well known actor in French cinema and self-proclaimed anti-philosopher who had a major public break with his former mentor Alain Badiou around the same time as the Arab spring was taking off. I just finished his first major work translated into English, … Continue reading Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: A Catharsis of Pleonexia
Alain Badiou’s translation of Plato leaves us with a rare sense that politics can once again be associated with truth, courage and justice, and that we have an agency at our disposal that comes in the passionate work of bringing the idea of equality into existence.
We should begin our journey into the difficult terrain of atheism with a reminder from another great French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who wrote, “we are always forced to think. Thinking is like a shove in our back. Thought is neither pleasant nor desired. It is a violence done to us.”
How much of your work as an activist is tethered to the whims of keeping the status quo together? If we take the line of thought (which I do) that those who are seeking to preserve the status quo are the new idealists then we ought to check our so called idealism, and give ourselves … Continue reading The New Realism
I'm very happy to announce a panel I'm putting together at the 2012 Žižek Studies Conference, "Neo-liberal Perversions: Fantasy and Gaze in Contemporary Culture" at the College at Brockport (SUNY) April 28-29, 2012. At the recommendation of the conference director, Antonio Garcia (a great guy), I invited a few friends from the European Graduate School … Continue reading Panel at 2012 Žižek Studies Conference: “The Perverted Subject Does (not) Exist: Subjectivity and Žižek’s Ethics”
In a previous post on Badiou's Theory of the Subject, I described how the subject disappears under the chain of the signifiers, and how the masses inhabit the dimension of the Lacanian real. In this post, I'm going to dig deeper into Badiou's text by looking at his wrestling with the concept of contradiction and … Continue reading What is a Contradiction? Badiou’s Theory of the Subject
The relationship between art and philosophy has centered on the linkage of truth to both fields. The work of art is always finite, and as such may be the only finite thing that exists. The problem of the linkage between the two is not philosophy, which never contains truth; the problem is the singularity of … Continue reading Art and Philosophy in Badiou’s HANDBOOK OF INAESTHETICS
An experimentation in various brands of public political expression, of an exceptionally dramatic nature.
A Site for the Radical Left
This is why I hate intellectuals
Replacing your neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness.
communist interventions readers
Pluralism and Individuation in a World of Becoming
ruins of the buddhist real
From Bauhaus to Beinhaus
bat020 = Anindya Bhattacharyya, writer/activist based in London. philosophy, revolutionary socialism, mathematics, technology, dance music. bat020.tumblr.com | @bat020 | facebook.com/bat020 | obvious gmail address
Philosophical Writings
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Cosmism, Prometheanism, New Enlightenment
No bells, just whistling in the dark...
Media, Culture, and Theory
"It’s always with another key that you unlock the house—inside: the snowdrifts of what’s never spoken." —Paul Celan
researcher, lecturer and author in Contemporary European Thought: Atheism and Religion
an otherwise excellent blog
Politics of Space and Bodies
"The Ding is the True Secret"
Insta-punditry on political economy.
so behind we're ahead
It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian
Rising Above Limitations, Expectations & Conditions
to make a system out of delusions
Asymmetrical critique
“A man with one theory is lost. He must have several, four, many! " —Bertold Brecht
