In light of the 2020 uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd taking place across America, I want to share an excerpt of a longer interview on riots and protests I conducted with the philosopher Alain Badiou in 2013. This excerpt concerns Badiou's definition of what a militant subject is today, that is, how … Continue reading Political emancipation and representation – Interview with Alain Badiou
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: A Catharsis of Pleonexia
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
Plato, Our Comrade? Alain Badiou’s Hyper-Translation of Plato’s Republic
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.
Difficult Atheism: Is Philosophy Finally Without God?
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.”
The New Realism
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
Panel at 2012 Žižek Studies Conference: “The Perverted Subject Does (not) Exist: Subjectivity and Žižek’s Ethics”
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”
What is a Contradiction? Badiou’s Theory of the Subject
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
Art and Philosophy in Badiou’s HANDBOOK OF INAESTHETICS
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
