Author Archives: politics

I stand by the ‘politics of prescription’ that I outlined back in 2005, and that Timothy Kaposy has kindly taken the time to consider in his article above. I think the general emphasis on universalisable and egalitarian principle, on subjective commitment and resolve, on the logic of consequence and anticipation, on an engagement with the strategic constraints of a specific situation, etc., remain pertinent to any conception of emancipatory politics worthy of the name. If anything, the last few years (2011-2014) have shown that these themes deserve more systematic attention, and appreciation, both in the domain of practical politics and in the domains of philosophy and political theory.

Read more on “From Prescription to Volition” by Peter Hallward…

“Philosophy is first and foremost this: the invention of new problems.”

-Alain Badiou

Published in 2004 with South Atlantic Quarterly, Peter Hallward’s essay “The Politics of Prescription,” is one of the most instructive responses to the philosophy of Alain Badiou to date. The essay breaks from the usual commentary about Badiou to explain a decrease of politically engaging philosophy across national contexts since 1973. Comprised of twelve theses, Hallward’s essay focuses on prescription as the “concrete transformation of those relations that sustain inequality, exploitation, or oppression” in the present. [1] Prescription is by no means exclusive to philosophy (re: medicine); nevertheless, the term helps Hallward for “a way out of an impasse” via a critique of philosophy’s underwriting of liberal statecraft. Where liberal political discourses of “communication, community, consensus, toleration, recognition, and so on” metastasize fantasies of social progress today, any reader of the daily news realizes these terms legitimate inaction amid systemic injustices. Prescription, by contrast, is a theoretical problem that Hallward makes explicit to seek an end to philosophy’s growing complicity with political orthodoxies.

Read more on “On the Problematic of Political Prescription” by Timothy Kaposy…

The philosophical injunction to grasp one’s time in thought is beset today by an oscillation between disorienting anxiety and a renascent enthusiasm. The anxiety is determined by the objective temporality of crisis, understood, in keeping with the medical derivation of the term from Hippocratic medicine, as that phase “in which a decision is due but has not yet been rendered” (Koselleck 361); when decisions are looking for their subjects. It is an anxiety that is also shadowed by a catastrophic tonality; in the absence of sublime visions of final collapse, there is a deep-seated sense that social stagnation or regression will continue to shadow any possible ‘recovery’, and that the only events punctuating an otherwise featureless future will be starkly negative.

Read more on “Politics in Pre-Political Times” by Alberto Toscano…

Applied to education, Alain Badiou’s work on ethics fundamentally challenges a dominant contemporary vision of education as a sophist’s affair (Bartlett, 2011; and as detailed in the North American context, see den Heyer, 2009a). This is a kind of education marked, first, by what A. J Bartlett explores as the ‘sophistic end (of preparing the youth with ‘skills’ to make their way in the state),’ second by ‘sophistic practice (which treats education as a commodity to be exchanged for other goods)’ and, finally, by sophistical ‘theory […] exemplified in the “democratic” relativism of Protagoras’s maxim that “man is the measure of all things”’ (Bartlett, 2011, p. 37). In contrast, Badiou affirms a life and an education by “truths” born of our ontological relationship to the “void”-set axiomatically contained, as Badiou applies set-theory, to all humanly constructed situations or set ups. Regardless of one’s social position, reputation, or usefulness to the state, we are all equidistance to the void. Encountering the void, ripping our tissues of knowledge or “opinion,” we encounter an “event” as that opportunity for “truth procedures” to articulate what will have been absurd not to have believed (an ethics in the tense of the future anterior, see den Heyer, 2009b; Gibson, 2006): “[A]s with anything that constitutes an event, worlds are turned upside down, neuroses engendered, terrible beauties are born and education departments are forced to confront something that they are professionally required to find incomprehensible, namely, the desire to be educated, as something over and above the development of a specialist-knowledge, vocational competence, or the vague promotion of currently venerated ‘values’ “(Cooke, 2013, p. 3).

Read more on “Badiou and the Educational Situation” by Kent den Heyer…

“Philosophy, which requires the deployment of four conditions, cannot specialize in any one of them.” -Alain Badiou, Metapolitics.

“[…] la détermination de l’essence de la politique, ne pouvant s’assurer ni de la structure (inconsistance des ensembles, dé-liaison) ni du sens (l’Histoire ne fait pas tout), n’a d’autre repère que l’événement.” -Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?

Read more on “For a ‘True Life’:  A Few Remarks on Politics as One of Philosophy’s Condition” by Gabriel Riera…

In “Politics in the Wake of Actually Existing Zeal,” after trying to explain some of the reasons for the urgency and necessity of Alain Badiou’s interventions in the current debate over philosophy and politics, Andrew Pendakis in his inimitable style—just look at the devastating sarcasm of the title alone—raises a set of “irritating questions” with which my book Badiou and Politics left him flush and unsettled. Though I may have provoked them, these questions seem less aimed at my work than at the thought of Badiou, so that it may seem presumptuous and out of place for me to try to answer them here. Badiou is certainly capable of speaking for himself, and I am less and less inclined to accept to be put in the position of having to defend or represent him. Nevertheless, insofar as several of the questions before us expand on doubts, criticisms, and polemical objections that I myself raise in Badiou and Politics, perhaps this is a good moment to reflect and comment on where I stand now and what I would do or am doing differently today.

Read more on “Badiou and Beyond: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation” by Bruno Bosteels…

Today’s first impressions leave us little room for doubt that between philosophy and politics there is nothing more to be said. Insofar as the former names a beleaguered, culturally peripheral disciplinary practice, it shares with stenography and bowling that dusty sense of lost necessity proper to all extinct, but once glowingly actual life-forms and habits. When it is not simply outright forgotten philosophy, like military history or Sudoku, fulfills the role of an involving cultural ‘pastime’. Obama famously huddled over Seneca at midnight: our moment’s dominant conception of the relationship between politics and philosophy defaults onto the grimly literal image of a presidential reading list. Such anecdotes, of course, consign philosophy to the same space reserved for religion and yoga, a marginal zone of leisured reflection where the vigorous actuality of politics can be regenerated by healing slowness and spirit. However bureaucratized its imperatives, however automated its contemporary forms, politics remains symptomatically attached to the Romantic particularity of the lawgiver, a mind and body that must periodically exit the bustle of policy to later return refreshed from discourse in the sober fora of the ancients.  Such is seemingly the best possible destiny of the philosopher: court whisperer, scratchy voice of reason, high-flown ancient wisdom on the margins of actually existing power.

Read more on “Politics in the Wake of Actually Existing Zeal: Badiou, Bosteels, and the Question of Political Affect” by Andrew Pendakis…