Configuration of power and disposition of rights. Materials on domination and difference from Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno and Alain Badiou

Although poetry once played an important role in shaping the community, the present day situation seems to call for another use of its powers. This, at least, is the shared assumption underlying an important discussion between Alain Badiou and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In their dispute, both hark back to Hölderlin’s work and its decisive role in today’s thought on poetry. Strikingly though, their interpretations of Hölderlin’s key role diverge widely, since Badiou bases himself on Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry, whereas Lacoue-Labarthe joins that of Walter Benjamin. Badiou believes that the poetry of Hölderlin is one of the main reasons why contemporary thought has to free itself of the ‘Age of the poets’; Lacoue-Labarthe, on the other hand, argues that Hölderlin’s poetry provides important new insights in the social relevance of poetry.

In this thesis I am tracing the historical development of subjectivity from its skeptical foundation in Descartes to Alain Badiou’s subject as fidelity to truth. Drawing from Martin Heidegger’s What is a Thing?, this history begins with the turn from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian apprehension of motion, turning towards an a priori mathematical projection of spatial uniformity, such that there are no longer different places – only quantifiable distance. It is on the basis of this turning away from tradition, or ordinary experience of different phenomena, that Descartes posits the self-certain I-pole. Heidegger criticizes modernity, defined as the merging of the metaphysical and the mathematical, for apprehending the relationship between man and world in only one way, as things. I hope show that this development does not derive from the mathematical alone, but from the project of objects against an objective background secured in an I-pole, further advanced by Kant’s transcendental reflection of the thing-in-itself over this project. I do this by following Alain Badiou’s assessment of Zermelo-Fraenkel’s axiomatic set theory, a particular mathematical model that self-destructs, meaning it cannot become absolute or dogmatic. With this thesis I hope to contribute to the scholarship of facticity, the existential thinking that begins with doubt. If we can dissociate in our ordinary language claims that utilize transcendental reasoning from claims concerning mathematical projection based on speculation alone, perhaps we might find some basis to make existential claims independent of perspective, or subjectivism.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of freedom is exceptional in contemporary political theory. First, it is positive, which puts it into opposition to the both current versions of its negative counterpart, the liberal (Isaiah Berlin), and the republican (Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit) concepts of freedom. In particular, a comparison between Arendt’s and Pettit’s ap-proaches allows establishing some striking points of antagonistic logical mirroring. Based on this, the notion of “schools of thought” is introduced, which plays an essential role in the subsequent discussion of Arendtian realism. Second, although Arendt’s theory of freedom shares features that are common to the major continental thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, or Alain Badiou, her solution to the problem of freedom aligns her closer to the liberals. Third, I argue that one should consider this logical irregularity as evidence in favor of her political realism, rather than a trivial inconsistency. This realism is the genuinely exceptional part of her legacy, which may guide us eventually, with modifications applied, to a paradigm shift in the current political philosophy. Finally, I present an evaluation of her solution to the problem of freedom, and a brief follow-up to some seemingly-out-of-place Arendtian notions, such as “excellence” and “elite.” Although in the final analysis, her solution seems to be artificial, it opens up a new promising area of research related to the notion of “benevolent excellence.”

Reviewed by: Laruelle: Against the Digital by Alexander R. Galloway Don Ihde (bio) Laruelle: Against the Digital. By Alexander R. Galloway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. 288. $27.50. Alexander R. Galloway is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University who specializes in continental philosophy, and in this case deals with what the back cover describes as “the idiosyncratic French thinker, François Laruelle.” I was shocked to realize I had never heard of Laruelle. Anxious to fill in any gaps in what has been the dominance of French philosophical thought in humanities, I plunged into what began as an almost impenetrable exposition of a philosopher who extolls the One, derides its distinction into Two and what is called “the standard model” of philosophy—identified by the author as the digital—and who (Laruelle) advocates non-philosophy. After a few pages, three prior philosophical experiences began to show relevance: First, early in my own graduate education I was fascinated with the Presocratics. Parmenides, after all, was the philosopher of the One, revived here in a more post-Heideggerian tone by Laruelle. Second, I was fortunate enough to twice live in Paris, first during the monumental years 1967–68, and later again in 1984, precisely times when French philosophy was in its heyday both in the universities and the streets. But was I missing something? Reading Laruelle I realized that there was another French philosophical strand not that of the dominant philosophies of the “Events of May.” And third, a very different philosophical strand related first to a fascination with Zen Buddhism while in theological school and later while working on my first forays into auditory phenomenology. Could we “think” non-linguistically? Or is thinking in a language—inner speech—a persistent feature of human experience? Is the One necessarily without language? Today one can recognize that unlike the dominant university/street talk of 1968, phenomenology—(Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur), hermeneutics (Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger), critical theory (Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse—Louis Althusser in France), structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure) post-structuralism (Jacques Derrida), postmodernism (Jean-François Lyotard)—there had begun what later is called “speculative [End Page 708] realism,” which one can associate with Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Laruelle. This strand, already present in 1968 with Deleuze, blooms later, closer to and after 1984. It is this strand which holds Galloway’s attention. Of the principals, Deleuze is probably the best known and Galloway claims, “We are all Deleuzians today” (p. 96). Laruelle places close to Deleuze, but even closer to Badiou. Yet all three are nostalgically Presocratics, I would say via a strand from Heidegger. Heidegger tried to return philosophy to the singular question of Being, in Presocratic language a variant on the One. Speculative realists, still following the strange blend of quasi-mythical but also highly abstract language, return to precisely these meditations. And they reinsert various “Platonic” strands of mathematical idealism. But Galloway’s target, captured in the subtitle, is the digital, which in the above renewed Presocratic conversation is the Two, the many, the multiple, the Digital. The standard model, academic philosophy, follows the Two, the Digital, and thus in the most concrete chapters of part II, withdrawing from the Standard Model, there is discussion of computers, capitalism, the black universe, etc. It is clear that digital technologies, in a capitalist network, are the enemies of “reality” of this Laruellean sort. This is an understandable reading and it reconnects with much of what also was the spirit of 1968—a revival of Marxism in its French mode (including Althusser, Deleuze, Badiou, and Laruelle), and a study of the theme of “autonomous technology,” a technology run away and on its own, now re-emergent as globalization. Laruelle, most radical of the group, wants to “unify philosophy and capitalism together as a single term” (p. 120). And finally, as Galloway reaches toward his conclusion, he claims, “All thought is essentially pre-Socratic” (p. 190). Included here should be the ultimate rejection of the digital and its technological incarnations (although he admits Laruelle says little about technologies as such...

In this edited collection of essays, ten experts in film philosophy explore the importance of transcendence for understanding cinema as an art form. They analyze the role of transcendence for some of the most innovative film directors: David Cronenberg, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, and Martin Scorsese. Meanwhile they apply concepts of transcendence from continental philosophers like Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Søren Kierkegaard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Each of the ten chapters results in a different perspective about what transcendence means and how it is essential to film as an art medium. Several common threads emerge among the chapters. The contributors find that the limitations of human existence are frequently made evident in moments of transcendence, so as to bring characters to the margins of their assumed world. At other times, transcendence goes immanent, so as to emerge in experiences of the surprising nearness of being, as though for a radical intensification of life. Film can also exhibit “ciphers of transcendence” whereby symbolic events open us to greater realizations about our place in the world. Lastly, the contributors observe that transcendence occurs in film, not simply from isolated moments forced into a storyline, but in a manner rooted within an ontological rhythm peculiar to the film itself.

Com carga horária de 60 horas a disciplina eletiva do curso de Mestrado Acadêmico em História da Arte, da Unifesp - campus de Guarulhos, possibilitou muitas questões acerca de como a relação entre Arte e Filosofia foram apreendidas durante a História. A consulta de diversos autores como Alain Badiou, Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agambem e Jacques Rancière ajudaram na compreensão desse processo, assim como a produção artística de propositores como Vik Muniz, Peter Greenaway e Ngwenya. Para a avaliação final desta disciplina os professores responsáveis solicitam a elaboração de um texto que, a partir das referências trabalhadas em aula, ajudassem o aluno a formular um conceito de Arte. Esse artigo vem reunir as principais reflexões levantadas durante todo o processo de avaliação da disciplina que conceituou uma possibilidade de entender a História da ArtePalavras-chave: avaliação, arte, filosofia.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly influenced philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. His accounts of human existence and being and his critique of technology have inspired theorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and the humanities. This Lexicon provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to Heidegger's notoriously obscure vocabulary. Each entry clearly and concisely defines a key term and explores in depth the meaning of each concept, explaining how it fits into Heidegger's broader philosophical project. With over 220 entries written by the world's leading Heidegger experts, this landmark volume will be indispensable for any student or scholar of Heidegger's work.

The introduction argues that indifference was registered as a problem linked to capitalist modernity by pointing out, with Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, and others, how human beings becoming indifferent has a detrimental effect on their self-understanding and on their practices.

In this edited collection of essays, ten experts in film philosophy explore the importance of transcendence for understanding cinema as an art form. They analyze the role of transcendence for some of the most innovative film directors: David Cronenberg, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, and Martin Scorsese. Meanwhile they apply concepts of transcendence from continental philosophers like Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Søren Kierkegaard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Each of the ten chapters results in a different perspective about what transcendence means and how it is essential to film as an art medium. Several common threads emerge among the chapters. The contributors find that the limitations of human existence are frequently made evident in moments of transcendence, so as to bring characters to the margins of their assumed world. At other times, transcendence goes immanent, so as to emerge in experiences of the surprising nearness of being, as though for a radical intensification of life. Film can also exhibit “ciphers of transcendence” whereby symbolic events open us to greater realizations about our place in the world. Lastly, the contributors observe that transcendence occurs in film, not simply from isolated moments forced into a storyline, but in a manner rooted within an ontological rhythm peculiar to the film itself.

As twentieth century philosophy fades into the distance, Martin Heidegger seems to be standing the test of time. His stature in continental philosophy is beyond question, and those French thinkers who avoid his influence most noticeably (such as Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) are often difficult for precisely this reason, since it is Heidegger who has shaped our vision of philosophy more than anyone else. Even analytic philosophers have begun to find useful insights in Heidegger's works, while no analytic thinker has a comparable influence in the other direction - not even Wittgenstein. As the dust settles on the past hundred years of philosophy, it is Heidegger who looms as the ancestor whose influence we most need to absorb and resist. No one has seen this more clearly than Emmanuel Levinas. His claim that we must leave the climate of Heideggerian philosophy, and that we cannot do so by returning to a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian, strikes me as definitive. Nor does Levinas offer this statement as merely a vague program: in my view, he has done more than anyone else to move us into the post-Heideggerian climate that he recommends. In the works of Levinas, the lasting breakthroughs of Husserlian phenomenology are present in easily recognizable form, even if played in a strange new key. He grapples with Heidegger's question of being and his famous tool-analysis, reworking them in ways their author never attempted. Levinas does this along two separate paths. First and most famously, he senses the lack of any ethical philosophy in Heidegger, and also identifies a new space for such an ethics: the famous alterity or exteriority of the other. In this way Heidegger is challenged from above, with an appeal to the good beyond being. In a second and less prominent sense, Levinas challenges Heidegger from beneath, with his concepts of enjoyment and the elemental. While Heidegger submits all objects to a relational system of tools serving a series of purposes, Levinas objects to this form of holism. Entities are not simply dissolved in some global system of purposes, but close off in themselves, with a sort of inviolable integrity apart from all networks or functions. Humans always stand somewhere in particular, bathing in the material reality of wind, water, and stars, not to mention hammers and cigarettes, none of them entirely used up by their assignment to wider purposes. It is often forgotten that this second criticism of Heidegger is the basis for the first: for in Totality and Infinity, it is separation that paves the way for exteriority and transcendence.1 In this article, I will claim that there is also a third critique of Heidegger to be found in Levinas, one more closely related to the second than to the first. As Alphonso Lingis has lucidly observed,2 Levinas gives us a new definition of individual substance without relapsing into the traditional substance discredited by Heidegger's shifting system of tools. For Levinas, specific things are not just ontic debris to be dissolved in a mighty ethical Other, but neither are they just formless elements such as water or clouds. Things are substances, closed off in themselves even while permeated by what lies beyond them. If metaphysics for Levinas is inconceivable without the command of the Other, it is also unthinkable without the integrity and resistance of specific, autonomous entities. Heidegger misses the ethical moment, but perhaps more fatefully, he also misses the unyielding autonomy of specific objects. While Heidegger is quick to dismiss drums, houses, and tea plantations as ontic, Levinas glimpses the metaphysical dimension of particular things. My one criticism of the Levinasian approach is that it remains too human-centered, too much in the shadow of Kant's Copernican Revolution. Things may hide behind their contours in substantial plenitude, resisting human effort, but Levinas also seems to grant them independence only when humans are on the scene to feel resistance. …

The essay examines Alain Badiou's concept of ‘anabasis’ and its disclosure in the poetry of Paul Celan. As a conceptualisation of the process of subject formation, anabasis is read as a rejoinder to that of ‘homecoming’, found in Martin Heidegger's appropriation of Friedrich Hölderlin's poems. Following an excursus on the philosophical and the ethical stakes at the heart of these movements, the essay close-reads two of Celan's poems in order to reveal poetry's own attempts to think through trajectories of emergent subjectivities in the wake of twentieth-century violence, as well as the as yet understated centrality of Celan's poetry to Badiou's wider philosophical project.

In the context of contemporary literary and cultural theory, the return of the religious (which also goes under the name of the religious or theological turn) has manifested itself in a number of different ways. First, and most visibly, a significant number of leading contemporary philosophers commonly identified as atheist or, at least, secularist in orientation (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean‐François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean‐Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Taylor) began to explore religious texts, themes or problems in their work over the course of the past 20 years. Second, the return of the religious has also taken the form of a revisionist reading of the religious dimensions of continental philosophy itself which both offers reinterpretations of canonical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas and reappraises hitherto marginalized or more secondary figures like Eric Petersen, Henri de Lubac, Jacob Taubes, and Michel de Certeau. Finally, the religious turn has also prompted a thoroughgoing re‐evaluation of a Judeo‐Christian tradition that had too easily been written off as metaphysical or ontotheological together with a contemporary reassessment of theological concepts such as messianic time, justice, givenness, confession, forgiveness, the universal, apophatic or negative theology, and, most recently, political theology. If the return of the religious in contemporary theory takes many different forms, though, a common theme running through all work in the field is a self‐conscious reflection on its own inherent assumptions. What exactly is “the religious”? How does its “return” manifest itself? Why has it come back now – if, indeed, it ever went away in the first place?

A man sets himself on fire in Tunisia. His self-immolation sparks a wildfire that transforms the Middle East and the world. What just happened? How are we to think and talk about these days of rage and hope, these potentially epoch-defining events? News cycles, with their commitment to reducing the most important events to little more than banal commodities, provide little help in the matter. Academics too often fail us, offering theoretical and methodological devotion at the expense of a commitment to the realities of emergent resistance. French philosopher Alain Badiou proves an exception, bringing equal parts rage and insight to his thinking of the events transforming our world.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou provides a provocative and illuminating engagement with the events of the Arab Spring while also offering an accessible and relatively concise introduction to his larger political and philosophical project. In it, Badiou steps away from his more commonly used anecdotes—particularly that of May 1968. Paying particular attention to the 2011 Egyptian protest in Tahrir Square that would ultimately lead to the resignation of the country's president, Badiou contends that these movements represent "a time of riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signaled and takes shape" (5). In his typically provocative, polemical, and often humorous style, Badiou seizes his opportunity to dress his theoretical commitments in new clothes and in the process, unwittingly, highlights various links to the field of rhetoric and the material implications of his most abstract theorizations.Among Badiou's crucial theoretical concepts articulated here is the event. Events are foundational breaks with the repetition and order of the world. They affirm profound political change and the unfolding of a new potential course of action. The event is something that appears but immediately disappears, supplementing the world with a new way of thinking and acting. The early twenty-first century is a time of great potential in this regard. The increase in riots around the world, both ones that are highly visible and ones that are relatively invisible, constitutes a phenomenon that does not properly have a name in the existing order of the world. This phenomenon lacks a name because the current configuration of epistemology fails to recognize its potential. This potential implicates the riot's relationship to events.While many of Badiou's contemporaries have discussed the event or analogous concepts, none of them have fully developed a formalized theory of the event in quite the same way Badiou has. In most cases, Badiou discusses events in abstract theoretical terms (2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2009; 2000), depending heavily on his mathematical take regarding ontology. At other times the event is applied specifically to a given truth process or field of possible evental emergence (2012; 2004) or case study as in the Rebirth of History and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Herein lies the value of The Rebirth of History: its ability to link the event to action and meaning in more tangible and digestible ways by using contemporary objects of analysis.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou posits the event in relationship to three types of riot: immanent, latent, and, most importantly to this text, historical. Each type of riot is discussed in terms of its potential to produce new political order and lasting material change. By articulating the event in relationship to riots that have immediate resonance, Badiou demonstrates how actions, resistance, and social unrest can produce the conditions of an event, extrapolating the relationship between communicative or rhetorical practice and his brand of thinking about change.1Early in the text, Badiou simultaneously establishes two key constructs, communism and capitalism. His undeniable Marxism is pronounced, but he distances himself from some of his Marxist contemporaries, such as Antonio Negri. For Badiou, Marxism is "the organized knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and fully realize an egalitarian rational figure of collective organization for which the name is 'communism'" (8). In other words, communism is the organized, proper name of the disruption of the structures, assumptions, and dynamics that create the world as it is (see Badiou 2010). Furthermore, capitalism is, in short, the name for the world as it is. It is the condition of our world, what dominates ideas and practices. Various mutations of capitalism have emerged that have led some to identify a postmodern capitalism. Postmodern capitalism, for Badiou, can be summed up as the contention that capitalism is ever changing, ever progressing, and potentially changing and progressing in ways that create spaces for new ways of living and distributing power. However, Badiou rejects this notion: "Contemporary capitalism possesses all the features of classical capitalism. It is strictly in keeping with what is to be expected of it when its logic is not counteracted by resolute, locally victorious class action" (11). In other words, our time is marked by the same principles of governance and action that Marx foretold. What some herald as the emergence of a postmodern capitalism is, for Badiou, no more than the "unfolding of the irrational and, in truth, monstrous potentialities of capitalism" (12). Only the disruptive force of an idea that achieves organized, continued enaction can interrupt capitalism; such was and is Badiou's hope for communism.The Rebirth of History demonstrates how riots, given the right circumstances, can constitute a break in the system and lead to the subsequent organization of alternative ways of being. Chapters 2 and 3 outline immanent riots and latent riots, respectively. Badiou first details how riots are positioned by the state according to the narratives that are designed to maintain state and global capitalist concerns, narratives that criminalize riots and undermine their potential to account for the majority of the world's population. This allows the state to reinforce police authority and its own criminal justice system. Badiou implicitly contends that the state's response to riots both materially and discursively positions collective resistance as a crime by creating double standards with regards to visibility and agency. To use an example from the text, "zero-tolerance" policies are applied differently to poor communities than they are to wealthy bankers or politicians, demonstrating a double standard with regard to criminality. In The Rebirth of History, Badiou is concerned with the double standards of justice and leniency that manifest themselves in response to riots as criminal acts and that simultaneously perpetuate a particular configuration of power. Badiou's term for the lack of agency that such a configuration of power imposes on certain populations is "inexistence." Inexistent populations are those populations that lack the ability to determine the course of politics in the world or to determine their own material or political subjectivity. Immediate riots are a response to inexistence and to the exercise of state authority against inexistent populations "An immediate riot is unrest among a section of population, nearly always in the wake of a violent episode of state coercion" (22). This type of riot, which can give birth to a historical riot, has three important qualities: they are spearheaded by the youth of a given population, take place in the territory inhabited and controlled by those who are rioting, and do not distinguish the subject types they invite to rebel, because rebellion is the sole defining characteristic of the subject type involved.2Latent riots are the product of unrest emerging within a configuration of power that effectively disciplines outbursts. The flexibility of "democratic" systems of governance lends itself to peaceful coexistence and has suppressed such rebellious vigor in many cases. This creates latency in unrest that runs parallel across various contexts, creating the conditions under which immediate riots can be disseminated without the local character of such acts having to be sacrificed. Latent riots are those acts of peaceful unrest that signal a novel form of unity among marginalized groups, traversing conventional borders and seemingly distinct populations. In other words, latent riots are the quiet conditions of possibility that have not yet overtly manifested as unrest, linking disparate groups.The primary characteristic of a historical riot is the transition from the undirected nihilism of the immediate riot to what Badiou calls prepolitical conditions that create the grounds for new ways of being or acting as a subject to emerge. Riots no longer rely on reactionary localization but control an enduring, secure site of protest and reappropriate that site and its significant symbols. The "Arab Spring" protests are an example of a historical riot. These protests did not spread from a central location but derived, by imitation, from latent discontent across a number of significant cities and sites, demonstrating an analogous dissatisfaction with the world in its current state.For Badiou, this constitutes the rebirth of history because historical riots introduce a new sequence of possibility into an otherwise redundant cycle of political and social conditions. Thus, Badiou dubs the historical riot as an intervallic period, that period during which an alternative and revolutionary political character has been defined but has yet to take a formalized structure. This character is "explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support" (39). What is still lacking is the powerful synthesizing hypothesis that move riots from the idea and its immanent manifestation of new political subjects to organized politics, that is, novel, creative, organized, and structured ways of distributing power.It is important to realize that the achievement of a historical riot does not guarantee that political action or political organization will follow. To put it in terms more common to Badiou's work, the opening of an event or of new potential configurations for action does not predetermine fidelity to the event itself. The leap to such a different, alternative form of political thought is difficult. Most riots are considered failures in their aftermath because it is easy to return to the already established, former structures and thus to the very relationships the riots resisted. Western countries and media outlets use the dogmatic categories of good and bad riots as a way of judging resistance under standards against which the resistance is opposed, thus encouraging a falling in line of rioters and observers. Good riots happen at a distance, away from the Western world. They are framed as eruptions of desire for a Western lifestyle rather than an act of dissent against its influence. This power to name "the Good is nothing but the modernized name for imperial interventionism" (49), because it perpetuates an adherence to the old way of thinking, being, speaking, and acting in the world by framing the riot as a manifestation of desire for Western systems. Bad riots are deemed irrational and are suppressed quickly because they rise up within overt Western configurations of power and thus violate the sensibilities that normalize and valorize that system. The value of the riot is its ability to manifest the ability to overcome such obstacles.Events and what they produce are not mere abstract desires to change; they are primarily material phenomena. Events create an opening for the emergence of what Badiou calls truth, that which is manifest in the immediate and productive being of the people. That is, Badiou presents truth as the process by which the idea (the kernels of aforementioned organizing principles) emerges and provides a new configuration of contingency. This configuration is derived from the universal imperative that is always present in localized resistance. The assumption here is that universals exist at the core of all ideological, political, or social programs. This new material manifestation of existence replaces inexistence. If inexistent populations "count for nothing" (55), to change the world is to make the inexistent exist. Such was the case in Tahrir Square when Egyptians demanded political existence and seized control of Egyptian political identity on their own terms. As the inexistent comes to exist, the arrangement of power and possibility, at least temporarily, is altered and any program that emerges from it may manifest this new arrangement. To deny a program its core imperative is to declaw it in the material and ideological struggle it must take part in. Badiou's call for the universal and for truth, as a form of justice, is a call for the core principles of material resistance to be maintained and not reappropriated and pacified by neoliberal commitments. This is imperative if a riot is to enact long-term, meaningful change rather than taking part in the repetition of world as it is.The emergence of existence from inexistence depends on two important, observable phenomena, both of which could be considered rhetorical. First, protestors must determine the meaning of a given site and important artifacts. For example, Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square established the meaning of the square, the Egyptian flag, and "Egyptianness," each of which was an important symbolic transgression against the state. Second, the minority in the street must undeniably come to represent an intense manifestation of the larger population and its discontents. This creates what Badiou calls a popular dictatorship. A popular dictatorship is "an authority that is legitimized precisely because its truth derives from the fact that it legitimizes itself" (59), expressing the general will of the people. This is accomplished through the construction of a will that is manifest directly in the site and that transgresses the given order of the world. The historical riots that may arise from such transgressions create the potential for a wide and organized political movement against the existing order, but do not—obviously—guarantee it.Ultimately, the emergence of a new political order is the logical extension of a historical riot. Three conditions must be satisfied for a historical riot to create the conditions for sustained political organization: the population must be contracted into a representative form of unrest, that unrest must be intensified in the form of political action, and a specific site and its transformation must be emphasized. If political organization emerges from an event, it faces the difficult imperative of remaining a student of this material process of the event itself. Failure to do so results in the betrayal of the creative character that ignited the movement and prevents politics from maintaining its novel character. This produces the ethical imperative in Badiou's theory, to remain faithful to the event (see Badiou 2002). Truly political organizations remain loyal to the material process that breaks with the world as it is and with its order. In this way it becomes a subject in the Badiouian sense of the word. That is, it becomes "a mediation between the world and changing the world" (66). The political organization is a subject of the event insofar as it maintains this mediation through its fidelity to the material emergence of a truth.After articulating the material process of the political organization as it emerges from an event, Badiou clarifies the role of identity and existence as imperatives to disruption. One of the primary mechanisms by which the state and the various mechanisms of global capitalism determine degrees of existence is the process of naming. Naming creates ideals by normalizing bonds between names and characteristics. The less symmetry between a given subject and the ideal—be it "French," "American," and so forth—the greater the possibility of inexistence marking the subject's being in the world. Varying degrees of inexistence are marked by what Badiou calls "separating names." Separating names are those that discern and socially position subjects and/or groups whose being is marked by inexistence.Justice, for Badiou, is the eradication of separating names as relevant and effective terms. By eradicating them the political burden is placed squarely on individual citizens to demonstrate their own political and social relevance and commitments. Badiou calls this process "political truth," the organized product of an event that restricts the power of the state and its reliance on constructions of identity and replaces it with the material practices of immanent, enacted subjectivity. To put it another way, political truth takes from the state the function of determining existence and places it in the hands of subjects themselves; political organizations formalize the results over time.This function of political truth is vital in The Rebirth of History. To suggest its importance, Badiou dedicates the closing chapters of the book to explicating his definition of it: "A political truth is a series of consequences, organized on the condition of an idea, a massive popular event, in which intensification, contraction, and localization replace an identitarian object, and the separating names bound up with it, with a real presentation of generic power of the multiple" (85). In chapter 9 Badiou dissects this definition and carefully explains each clause as a way of summarizing the book's contribution to our body of knowledge about resistance. In the closing pages of the chapter, Badiou identifies an important assumption that lies behind his work: the passion for the universal, the ability to manifest existence and shake the chains of separating names and other mechanisms that create inexistence, is a passion shared by most people. For Badiou, a desire for justice is a desire for a different unfolding of the world. This requires the emergence of a universal from localization, a universal that demands a new way of being and thinking in the world.Historical riots, insofar as they are events that could potentially produce political organizations, must be affirmative. They shift from the negative critique of the immediate riot to the affirmative creative politics necessary for sustained resistance to the world as it is. Their mode of production is material and demonstrates that what is visible or knowable in a given context should not be taken at face value. The Rebirth of History closes with two popular press articles written by Badiou on the subject of resistance, the first of which deals explicitly with Egypt and the second of which addresses the legitimacy and illegitimacy of leaders in the contemporary world. Each article further articulates aspects of Badiou's theory in applied and digestible ways.The Rebirth of History is a small but substantial piece of Badiou's larger body of scholarship, a welcome one for those who have pondered the applicability of his thought in the field of rhetoric. Badiou's explanation of his theory of change here seems ripe for rhetorical consideration, particularly as he applies it to contemporary popular protest. While Badiou hedges his bets with The Rebirth of History by publishing the book so quickly after the uprisings in question and thus limits his own ability to predict the political success of the riots, I believe there are at least three specific elements, of the theoretical framework Badiou utilizes that rhetorical scholars may consider drawing on and perhaps adding to. First and foremost, Badiou's explicit materialist commitments warrant consideration. Since rhetoricians have taken up the field's relationship to materiality, perhaps Badiou's materially produced subjectivity and materially unfolding truth may push rhetoricians to think in new ways about what constitutes a rhetorical act and how it may relate to change or subjectivity. Second, Badiou's emphasis on the reconstitution of the site is rife with rhetorical character. How does the site help condense the concerns of populations into a minority of active rioters? What are the methods by which protestors can and do reconstitute the meaning of a site? What makes such reconstitution so powerful? The idea of the site and localization has been and should remain an important consideration for rhetorical scholars, and these questions may press the field in inventive directions. Finally, Badiou's use of existence and inexistence highlights inequality in the world as it is and nuances universality in a way that may be more digestible and usable for rhetoricians than his former works. Universality, here, is a theoretical imperative. The universal or generic should not be reduced to a utopian notion but should be understood as the proper name of that which is productive and radical in a given location. For rhetoricians the question becomes how we can use this concept of the universal (or generic) and the local to complicate and inform our treatment of local political resistance.Badiou's theory of social and political change is often seen as overly complex and abstract. The Rebirth of History provides a welcome grounding of this theory in a contemporary and pressing political uprising. This book will find relevance with philosophers, political theorists, and rhetorical scholars interested in social change and progressive and creative ways of thinking it. In the face of the various forces razing the grounds for a new world, Badiou's work helps us see that the delicate dance between chaos and control holds considerable promise and profound challenges. He charges us to think creatively about resistance and the affirmation of its emergence.

This paper puts forward a new way of thinking about objects, worlds, and events. The philosophical contribution of the paper pivots around the idea that objects are force-full: smoldering furnaces of affects that are capable of creating, policing, and destroying the very contours of existence. The paper begins with a problem, which is how to account for objects, worlds, and events outside of human consciousness or ‘in-themselves’. It answers by constructing an ‘evental geography’ from the ontologies of Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, and Graham Harman. A ‘geo-event’ names the transformation of a world – from galaxies to nation states to ecosystems – by ‘inexistent’ objects and the forces they unleash. The paper is situated at the busy crossroads of (object-oriented) philosophy, non-representational theory, and actor-network theory.

The Politics of Lack Lasse Thomassen Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. The Ticklish Subject is a recent work by Slovene philosopher, social theorist, and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, who has produced books at the pace of more than one per year since the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology. As in his previous books, Zizek intermixes psychoanalysis, nineteenth-century German philosophy, political theory, and popular culture. With The Ticklish Subject, Zizek endeavors to bring together three of his main concerns: Lacanian psychoanalysis, the question of subjectivity, and the possibilities for a Leftist politics in today’s late-capitalist, postmodern world. He sets out to provide a “systematic exposition of the foundations of his theory” (to quote the book’s cover), in order to address the relation between Lacanian theory, subjectivity, and politics. Thus, The Ticklish Subject purports to be a Lacanian theory of politics and the political—in short, a theory of political subjectivity. The book is divided into three parts, each of which addresses one of three important formulations of subjectivity: the German Idealist subject, the political subject of French post-Althusserian political philosophy, and the deconstructionist and multi-spectral subject theorized by Judith Butler. In each of the book’s three main parts, Zizek starts from a critical reading of Martin Heidegger’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Judith Butler’s respective critiques of the traditional Cartesian notion of the subject. As an alternative to the Cartesian subject and to the three critiques of the Cartesian subject, Zizek proposes a Lacanian notion of subjectivity. To explain what this involves, we can start by looking at the notion of the decision and at the distinctions Zizek makes between the “ontological” and the “ontic.” Whereas the ontic refers to what is—that is, to a positive being—the ontological refers to the conditions of possibility and limits of what is. With the ontic we ask what is; with the ontological we ask how it is possible that it can be. Zizek believes that no ontic content or being can be derived from an ontological form. In other words, there is no concrete ontic content that can be the positive expression of being as such—that is, of the ontological order. In this sense, the ontological relates to the ontic in the same way as form relates to content. What Zizek wants to stress here is that it is not possible to find a concrete community that expresses the structure of community as such. So, for instance, he criticizes Heidegger’s assertion that the National Socialist State is the concrete expression of the structure of community and social being as such. Heidegger’s fault lies in the fact that he tries to establish a necessary connection between the ontological (the structure of social being as such) and a particular ontic being (the National Socialist State). We may be able to deconstruct community to show the conditions of possibility of community, but we cannot find the particular community that best expresses these conditions of possibility. Zizek develops this argument as a critique of Heidegger. The problem with Heidegger is that on one hand he insists on the distinction between the ontological and the ontic, but on the other hand he ends up looking for the particular ontic community that would realize the “essence” of the ontological structure of society as such, that is, for the ontic of the ontological. Zizek insists that there is an insurmountable gap between the ontological and the ontic, and that we are not able to move directly from one to the other. In other words, it is not possible to proceed directly from a formal argument to a particular substantial argument, from form to content. The question then becomes how the gap between them is filled or bridged. Here we encounter Zizek’s notion of the decision, which fills the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The decision cannot be grounded in any ontological structure, but this does not mean that you cannot give grounds for the decisions you make. What it means is that the decision can only...