Through a detailed study of Spinoza's concept of 'experience', Moreau shows how Spinoza extends the power of reason to capture the singularity of individuals: their lives, languages, passions and societies.

This article deals with Alain Badiou’s practical and theoretical engagements with the SONACOTRA rent strike, which ran from 1975 to 1979 and mobilized tens of thousands of immigrant workers across France. Drawing on the work Histoire politique du mouvement des foyers Sonacotra, a retrospective study written collectively by members of Badiou’s Maoist group L’Union des communistes de France marxistes-léninistes, we demonstrate how the practical stakes of the movement were taken up in philosophical form in the contemporaneous text Theory of the (...) Subject. Finally, we suggest that this interweaving of practice and theory is an exemplary instance of Badiou’s conception of politics as the immanent construction of a universal—a conception that links Badiou’s Maoist engagements with his current philosophical and political commitments, from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds. (shrink)

Featuring original interviews with three of the most important theorists of the 21st century, this volume clarifies the relationship between contemporary French philosophy and poetry. The interviews demonstrate how Rancière, Milner, and Badiou are all in conversation with one another on various points.

Despite being the work of one of the 20th-century’s most famous philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason has never been fully integrated into our collective philosophical consciousness. None of the book’s key concepts, from seriality to the group, have come to play an important role in other philosophers’, sociologists’, or political theorists’ work. Amongst Sartre scholars, while work on the Critique has increased steadily in recent years, in particular in France and Belgium, no critical consensus exists about the book’s (...) overall meaning or value. On the occasion of the Critique’s 60th birthday, in this article I provide a summary of its main aims and concepts with a view to establishing a new basis for reading and discussing the book. I will argue that the Critique is a coherent and unique work of social theory that speaks to a world suffering an overwhelming wave of what Sartre calls ‘counter-finality’ in the form of climate change. (shrink)