This book provides both a historical analysis of the philosophical problem of individuation, and a new trajectory in its treatment. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as C.S. Peirce and the lesser-known Gilbert Simondon, Alberto Toscano takes the problem of individuation, as reconfigured by Kant and Nietzsche, into the realm of modernity, providing a unique and vibrant contribution to contemporary debates in European philosophy.
This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, ...
Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientific materialism is then contrasted with a different diagnosis of the abstractive maladies of modern society, the one (...) put forward under the Marxist rubric of `real abstraction'. While both stances allow us to explore the social repercussions of abstractive practices, it is argued that an understanding of the practically abstract character of capitalism permits us to identify the limits of Whitehead's pedagogical wish to reform our culture of abstraction. (shrink)
This article reconsiders Marx’s thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the ‘real abstractions’ that dominate our social existence. The tools forged by Marx in his engagement with critiques of religious authority allow him to discern the (...) ‘religious’ and ‘transcendent’ dimension of state and capital, and may contribute to a contemporary investigation into the links between capitalism as a religion of everyday life and what Mike Davis has called the current ‘reenchantment of catastrophic modernity’. (shrink)
Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, Translated, Edited and withan Introduction by Norman Madarasz ISBN - 9780791442197Alain Badiou, Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Translated and with aPreface by Louise Burchill ISBN - 9780816631391.
pThere is much theoretical work already underway on the many facets of Badiou#39;s theory of political subjectivation. However, little attention has been directed hitherto to those figures of the subject which cannot be easily identifiable with a universalist or generic orientation. Beginning with Badiou#39;s struggles with the subjectivity of the bourgeois in the seminars that make up his Theorie du sujet , this article tries to track his thinking of the #39;other#39;, non- or anti-universalist subjects of politics, and to think (...) what effects their inclusion within a theory of the subject, and indeed a theory of political praxis, may have. Taking issue with some recent remarks of Badiou on the isomorphies between Islamism and fascism in Logiques des mondes , the article also seeks to develop Badiou#39;s notion of #39;reactive#39; and #39;obscure#39; subjects through a brief engagement with recent interpretations of political Islam./p. (shrink)
This article seeks to trace the origins of contemporary ‘post-workerism’ in the formulation of concepts of political subjectivity, antagonism and insurrection in Tronti and Negri. In particular, it tries to excavate the seemingly paradoxical position which postulates the increasing immanence of struggles, as based on the Marxian thesis of real subsumption, together with the intensification of the political autonomy or separation of the working class. In order to grasp the political and theoretical proposals of Italian workerism and autonomism, Toscano concentrates (...) on the thesis of a historical transformation of capitalism into an increasingly parasitical and politically violent social relation, a thesis which is grounded in an interpretation of Marx’s notion of ‘tendency’ and which serves as the background to the exploration, especially in Negri, of increasingly uncompromising forms of antagonism. The article focuses especially on Tronti’s so-called ‘Copernican revolution’—giving workers’ struggles primacy in the understanding of capitalism—and critically inquires into the effect of this workerist axiom on Negri’s writings on proletarian sabotage and insurrection in the 1970s. By way of a conclusion, it notes the difficulties in prolonging the workerist gambit in light of capital’s continued effort, as Tronti would put it, to emancipate itself from the working class. (shrink)
Is it possible to derive the outlines of a thinking of politics from the writings of Gilbert Simondon ? We will sketch an affirmative response by focusing our attention on three aspects of Simondon’s philosophy: 1. The manner in which the concept of Nature or the pre-individual displaces the debates over the relationship between political action, human nature and biological capacity; 2. The importance of the excess of « subject,) over « individual o as the matrix of a politics of (...) the transindividual; 3. The possibility of envisaging the notion of disparation, especially through its Deleuzian reading, as an essential contribution to a political philosophy of difference, that is, to a non-dialectical thinking of construction and conflict. We will end with a consideration of the limits of Simondon, limits in our view concentrated in the equivocal and irenic notion of « culture » or « technical culture. ». (shrink)
Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital’s challenge to philosophy’s self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek’s tendency to elide a model of (...) abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek’s recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx’s conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a Hegel. (shrink)
The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified a crisis in the functions and the perception of the state. It has also revealed underlying contradictions in both mainstream and radical ideologies of the state. A desire for the state as guarantor of public welfare vies with fear of the state’s hypertrophic capacities for surveillance and control. Following a brief exploration of the intimate modern connection between plagues and the state, the article tries to map some of the ways in which the state (...) has been at stake in political and theoretical commentaries on the pandemic. Is an epidemiological politics from below, beyond the plague state, possible? Can recent emergency measures be seen as incomplete or inverted anticipations of a communist use of the state of exception? Or is the primacy of the political we are currently experiencing a mere fetish, indissociable from the rule of capital? (shrink)
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This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology, the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s œuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and the (...) presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson’s theorising. (shrink)
This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.
Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure (...) and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education. Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art. Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)
On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed and the revolt was quashed. Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a (...) foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. And with the addition of an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League, this volume becomes a crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy. (shrink)
A searing introduction to Franco Fortini, a Jewish communist and a major figure in postwar Italian intellectual life, _The Dogs of the Sinai_ is a book against—against those who love to rush to the aid of the victors, against the widespread and racist contempt for Arabs, and against the celebration of modern civilization and technology that Israel embodies. It is also the book in which Fortini sought to clarify for himself his conflicted identity as an Italian Jew. An uncomfortably timely (...) book, _The Dogs of the Sinai_ combines polemic and autobiography with narrative and criticism in a terse and finely wrought reflection on politics, identity, and truthfulness in the period after the Six Day War of 1967. As topical today as it was forty-five years ago, this meditation against power is published alongside _Fortini/Cani_, a film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, drawn from Fortini’s essay. The film includes moving scenes of the author reading excerpts from his book against quiet landscapes. _The Dogs of the Sinai_ is a powerful text from one of the most important intellectuals of the Italian New Left. (shrink)
This essay explores Jameson’s reading of Goethe’s Faust II in Allegory and Ideology, putting it into dialogue with enquiries into Goethian allegory by other Marxist critics, namely Georg Lukács, Cesare Cases and Franco Fortini. Allegories of monetisation and dispossession in Faust II are explored, along with the limits of Lukács’s partial devaluation of the allegorical. The essay focuses in particular on how Jameson’s reading of Faust II can be interpreted as an allegory of theory itself, and in particular of the (...) dialectic, thereby returning us to Lukács’s own parallel reading of Faust and Hegel’s Phenomenology, albeit in a different key. (shrink)
The decisive inquiry into the volatile link between philosophy, revolution, and the 'radical' is arguably Marx's 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction', written in 1843. We can still find all these themes introduced by Marx at work 80 years later in an emblematic and instructive confrontation between Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Where Lukács presents the proletariat as the practical and epistemological 'Archimedean point' capable of unhinging the capitalist totality, Bloch reveals in a subjective (...) metahistory of a utopian kernel whose drive and directionality – despite all of the changes in instruments, organisations, and motivating ideologies – remains invariant from the Taborites to the Bolsheviks. To borrow Lukács's formulation, we are thus confronted with two potent, and alternative ways, to politically and conceptually grasp the statement that man 'both is and at the same time is not', or, in Blochian terms, both is and is not-yet. This antinomy signified by the names and texts of Lukács and Bloch is visible in the insistence of contemporary radical thought on the enigmas of philosophical anthropology, the political repercussions of messianism, and the possibility of a rational and partisan subjectivity. (shrink)
In this polemical intervention within the field of French and European social theory, Franck Fischbach proposes to revive and radicalise the tradition of social philosophy. The latter is understood, following Axel Honneth, in terms of the normatively-driven analysis of socio-economic processes that may be characterised as pathologies of the social. Fischbach contrasts the lessons of social philosophy from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School with the recent ascendance to intellectual hegemony of a formalistic, procedural liberalism which is oblivious to social negativity. (...) The review questions the capacity of social philosophy to synthesise stances as politically and methodologically different as those of de Maistre, Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the very pertinence of the appellation ‘philosophy’. Fischbach’s more historically determinate definition of social philosophy as arising out of the critique of Jacobin revolutionary political thought, with its supposed abstraction and voluntarism, fails to contend with the claims of ruptural politics, as well as with those positions that would regard crisis and pathology not just as a menace, but also as an opportunity for liberation. In the end, in spite of its able historical and conceptual mapping, and its commendable demand for totalising critique, Fischbach fails to persuade in his claim that social philosophy is the name for emancipatory thought in the present. (shrink)
This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of "Prometheanism".
This article provides a brief commentary on Éric Alliez and Antonio Negri's `Peace and War', focusing mainly on their understanding of political ontology, their analysis of the transformations undergone by the link between sovereignty and warfare, and their attempt to delineate the place of artistic practice within a biopolitics of the multitude.
Este pequeño ensayo pretende ir más allá de las celebraciones hagiográficas que hacen del Manifiesto Comunista un monumento para reflexionar sobre las lecciones que se pueden extraer de las formas específicas de su fallida realización. Contra el cliché de que el Manifiesto es un texto profético, deberíamos explorar la disyunción entre el pronóstico incisivo de la “prosa” del capitalismo y la anticipación frustrada de la “poesía” de la revolución. Este ensayo argumenta que las limitaciones analíticas y políticas del Manifiesto deben (...) ser localizadas en la excesiva linealidad y homogeneidad con que enmarca los poderes de abstracción del capital. En la medida en que el capital procede mediante una dialéctica de la homogeneización y la diferenciación, de la expansión y la división espacial, la erosión de la tradición y su refuncionamiento cínico con el objeto de apuntalar la dominación, las tareas de la unidad de la clase obrera y la internacionalización planteadas por el Manifiesto devienen aún más apremiantes políticamente, y cualquier cosa excepto inevitables. (shrink)
