Various issues concerning the neural blackboard architectures for combinatorial structures are discussed and clarified. They range from issues related to neural dynamics, the structure of the architectures for language and vision, and alternative architectures, to linguistic issues concerning the language architecture. Particular attention is given to the nature of true combinatorial structures and the way in which information can be retrieved from them in a productive and systematic manner.

We discuss a visual blackboard architecture that could be involved in imagery. In this architecture, networks that process identity information interact with networks that process location information, in a manner that produces structural (compositional) forms of representation. Architectures of this kind can be identified in the visual cortex, but perhaps also in prefrontal cortex areas related with working memory.

Cognitive agents are dynamical systems but not quantitative dynamical systems. Quantitative systems are forms of analogue computation, which is physically too unreliable as a basis for cognition. Instead, cognitive agents are dynamical systems that implement discrete forms of computation. Only such a synthesis of discrete computation and dynamical systems can provide the mathematical basis for modeling cognitive behavior.

We discuss the role of synchrony of activationin higher-level cognitive processes. Inparticular, we analyze the question of whethersynchrony of activation provides a mechanismfor compositional representation in neuralsystems. We will argue that synchrony ofactivation does not provide a mechanism forcompositional representation in neural systems.At face value, one can identify a level ofcompositional representation in the models thatintroduce synchrony of activation for thispurpose. But behavior in these models isalways produced by means conjunctiverepresentations in the form of coincidencedetectors. Therefore, models that rely onsynchrony (...) of activation lack the systematicityand productivity of true compositional systems.As a result, they cannot distinguish betweentype and token representations, which resultsin misrepresentations of spatial relations andpropositions. Furthermore, higher-levelcognitive processes will likely integrateinformation from widely distributed areas inthe brain, which puts severe restrictions onthe underlying neural dynamics if synchrony ofactivation is to play a role in theseprocesses. We will briefly discuss theserestrictions in the case of feature binding invisual cognition. (shrink)

Human cognition is unique in the way in which it relies on combinatorial (or compositional) structures. Language provides ample evidence for the existence of combinatorial structures, but they can also be found in visual cognition. To understand the neural basis of human cognition, it is therefore essential to understand how combinatorial structures can be instantiated in neural terms. In his recent book on the foundations of language, Jackendoff described four fundamental problems for a neural instantiation of combinatorial structures: the massiveness (...) of the binding problem, the problem of 2, the problem of variables, and the transformation of combinatorial structures from working memory to long-term memory. This paper aims to show that these problems can be solved by means of neural “blackboard” architectures. For this purpose, a neural blackboard architecture for sentence structure is presented. In this architecture, neural structures that encode for words are temporarily bound in a manner that preserves the structure of the sentence. It is shown that the architecture solves the four problems presented by Jackendoff. The ability of the architecture to instantiate sentence structures is illustrated with examples of sentence complexity observed in human language performance. Similarities exist between the architecture for sentence structure and blackboard architectures for combinatorial structures in visual cognition, derived from the structure of the visual cortex. These architectures are briefly discussed, together with an example of a combinatorial structure in which the blackboard architectures for language and vision are combined. In this way, the architecture for language is grounded in perception. Perspectives and potential developments of the architectures are discussed. Key Words: binding; blackboard architectures; combinatorial structure; compositionality; language; dynamic system; neurocognition; sentence complexity; sentence structure; working memory; variables; vision. (shrink)

Belgium is one of very few countries where euthanasia on the basis of psychiatric illness is legally possible. Three physicians involved in the euthanasia of a 38-year-old woman suffering from psychiatric illness recently faced a criminal trial for “murder by poisoning”, for allegedly having failed to comply with several requirements of the Belgian Euthanasia Law. Although none of the physicians were convicted, the case generated extensive debate, in the media and the general public as well as in the medical profession (...) and among policy makers. In this chapter, we take this trial as the starting point for a critical analysis of the clinical-psychiatric, ethical, and legal issues involved in evaluating euthanasia requests in cases of complex psychiatric disorders. In these cases, the requirements of the Belgian Euthanasia Law could be improved by mandating the advice of two psychiatrists, who are experts in the treatment of the specific condition of the person requesting euthanasia. Simultaneously with the process of evaluating the euthanasia request, there should be a parallel treatment track in which all therapeutic and recovery-oriented options are explored. These two tracks should not be in the hands of the same physician. (shrink)

This publication contains reflections on Jacques Ranciáere's essay 'The Ignorant Master' by the artist Marc De Blieck and the art philosopher Volkmar Mèuhleis. The artist's practice is assuming an expanding variety of forms, the artist can leap from one method to another, and the media available to him, old and new, appear inexhaustible. Can and should art education prepare the artist for this? One possibility is to bring a never-ending abundance of experts into the art schools. Ranciáere offers us (...) a provocative alternative in the form of Jacotot, the ignorant master. In part, the book indirectly endorses present-day art education, but at the same time a number of the controversial arguments it contains challenge one to self-reflection. (shrink)

van de Kamp, Gerrit Interest in various types of Spirit Christology has remained constant throughout the past. This type of Christology is usually recognised and valued for the attention it devotes to the true humanity of Christ. In this area Spirit Christology has an advantage over classical Christology, as the latter is blamed for not doing justice, or for being incapable of doing justice, in its expositions, to the fact that Christ is truly man. On the other hand Spirit Christology (...) fails to escape the charge that it cannot do justice to maintaining the uniqueness of Christ. In discussing the work of theologians who advocate some kind of Spirit Christology, therefore, we encounter the names of historical propositions that have been condemned in pronouncements of authoritative church fathers and councils. In Christological perspective this generally means adoptionism or in one instance psilanthropism, the proposition that Jesus was merely man. At the base of this rejection lies the fear of putting church teaching on the Trinity at risk through modalism or binitarianism. So we often see that those sympathising with Spirit Christology still opt for classical Christology. (shrink)

Beschouwing door de rabbijn over het wetsvoorstel om onverdoofde, rituele slacht te verbieden, gezien als een aantasting van de vrijheid van godsdienst van zowel joden als moslims.

In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($◊a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in his (...) theory, Lacan conceptualizes the object of desire as the unconsumed treasure—and, in that sense, the “nothing”—on which the miser’s desire is focused. But the more Lacan develops his new object theory, the more he realizes how close it is to Christian mysticism in locating the ultimate object of desire in God, in a sevenfold “nothing” (to quote the famous last step in the ascent of the Mount Carmel as described by John of the Cross). An analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet allows Lacan to escape the Christian logic and to rearticulate the object of desire in an ‘unchristian’ tragic grammar. When he replaces the miser by the lover as paradigm of the subject’s relation to its object of desire, he substitutes a strictly Greek kind of love—eros, not agape—for the miser’s relationship to his treasure. Even when, in the late Lacan, “love” becomes a proper concept, its structure remains deeply “tragic.”. (shrink)

La manière de concevoir ce qu’est un texte relève d’une conception des sources du sens; cette conception découle d’une prise de position philosophique non seulement sur le langage, mais sur les pratiques discursives, celle de l’interprétation, comme celle de la traduction. À partir d’un exemple, emprunté à la Bible, et de la conception que Ricœur développe de ce qu’il entend par “texte,” on montrera à quelles impasses peuvent conduire des interprétations et, donc, des traductions qui refusent de situer les sources (...) du sens dans les textes. (shrink)

Dans L’Etoile..., donc avant de devenir avec Buber le traducteur de la nouvelle Bible en allemand, Rosenzweig s’appuie sur une théorie du langage comparable à celle, contemporaine, de Benjamin, et centrée sur l’idée que le sens s’est, depuis l’origine, déposé dans des noms. Ce qui l’entraîne à interpréter Genèse I en s’appuyant sans en être conscient sur la version des LXX, et en passant à côté de la syntaxe et de la sémiotique propres du texte; or le sens n’est pas (...) antérieur à son expression, et Genèse I ne peut donc conforter la conception rosenzweigienne du langage, pas plus, chez Benjamin, l’interprétation qu’il donne de Genèse II. (shrink)

Teaching about technology, at all levels of education, can only be done properly when those who teach have a clear idea about what it is that they teach. In other words: they should be able to give a decent answer to the question: what is technology? In the philosophy of technology that question is explored. Therefore the philosophy of technology is a discipline with a high relevance for those who teach about technology. Literature in this field, though, is not always (...) easy to access for non-philosophers. This book provides an introduction to the philosophy of technology for such people. It offers a survey of the current state-of-affairs in the philosophy of technology, and also discusses the relevance of that for teaching about technology. The book can be used in introductory courses on the philosophy of technology in teacher education programs, engineering education programs, and by individual educators that are interested in the intriguing phenomenon of technology that is so important in our contemporary society. (shrink)

In spirituality and mysticism, many seek a counterbalance to the strong emphasis on the self that modernity demands of us: We desire a fixed self on the one hand and are fascinated by selflessness on the other. But is our fascination with selflessness not a ruse to make that self of ours even stronger? And is that self-critical question not the kernel of even traditional mysticism? Marc De Kesel investigates some dark rooms of the mystical tradition to clarify this. (...) This is a book for all who want to free themselves from the conceptual frameworks and rigid dogmas of late-modern religiosity. The first part of the volume deals directly with early modern Christian mysticism, and more specifically with the French spiritualité and discussions centered around the problem of what it means to love God in a pure, radically unselfish way. The second part explores the paradoxical dialectics between self and selflessness in relation to the way Christian religion deals with its own identity. If Christian love is selfless, why has Christianity in the end not given up its own self, its own identity? The third and last part of the volume discusses the dialectics between self and selflessness in three other domains: popular spirituality, politics, and modern science. It makes clear that "selflessness" is not limited to mysticism but is both a fascination and a problem/paradox for modernity in many fields. (shrink)

The caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi is still with us. Behind this caricature sits a long history of misreading and deception, including the well-known story of Nietzsche's Nazi sister, Elisabeth Förster, who took over Nietzsche's work when he became catatonic and systematized a disparate set of texts as The Will to Power. Despite much remarkable work by scholars to debunk the idea that Nietzsche was a racist, or an anti-Semite, or both, this view continues to influence much of (...) the popular perception of Nietzsche and his work. In Nietzsche and Race, Marc de Launay, editor of the Pléiade edition of Nietzsche's writings, deftly counters this persistent narrative in a series of concise and highly accessible reflections on the concept of "race" in Nietzsche's published writings, notebooks, and correspondence. De Launay relates these discussions of race to the central themes of Nietzsche's philosophical project, definitively showing how Nietzsche's use of the term "race" simply does not map onto "racism" in any of the ways his detractors have claimed. (shrink)

Il n’est pas surprenant que nombre de Professeurs d’université aient fait preuve de patriotisme en se solidarisant avec leur pays, l’Allemagne, lorsque a éclaté la Première Guerre mondiale. Il est, en revanche, tout à fait étonnant que cette littérature patriotique ait très tôt basculé dans une propagande qui allait à l’encontre même de leurs convictions philosophiques, qui les poussait, pour certains, à une surenchère telle que la guerre apparaissait comme une épreuve quasi divine où la mort jouait un rôle de (...) purification salutaire et sacrificielle, confinant au gnosticisme. (shrink)

La tradition philosophique moderne et contemporaine est maintes fois référée au texte biblique en obéissant à des intentions très diverses; mais lorsqu’elle le fait en cherchant à solliciter son autorité, on constate qu’elle hésite toujours à reconnaître une dette à l’égard de la Bible. Or cette dette est patente si l’on admet que la philosophie ne puise pas seulement à une source ontothéologique strictement hellénique, et si l’on peut montrer à quel point la question de l’historicité, du temps historique, n’a (...) cessé d’être probléma- tique dans les système philosophiques des deux derniers siècles. La présente étude cherche à montrer comment le texte biblique, dès la Genèse, introduit une innovation culturelle majeure: une autre conception de l’historicité. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 63-78.

Visual art owes its modernity from the crisis it fell into in the midst of the nineteenth century. Courbet’s call for realism questioned the foundation of the art of his time. The incapacity of the series of ‘-isms’ that followed to answer Courbet’s call, pointed to a crisis not only in art, but in the then emerging non-artistic visual culture in general. In fact, Courbet’s call questioned the image paradigm that was in force since the Renaissance: the one of ‘representation’. (...) The crisis of art laid bare the crisis of the representation paradigm. Modern art’s complex relation to religion and spirituality must be understood in the context of this paradigm crisis. Although generally anti-religious, modern art often keeps on being fascinated by religion, spirituality, and mysticism. The ‘religious’, the ‘holy’, the ‘sanctity’ modern art is inclined to, is linked to the crisis it originates from. Does this reference to the religious and the spiritual, then, constitute the answer to that crisis? I defend the thesis that it rather affirms this very crisis. If there is something ‘holy’ in art, it is not the answer to which it makes people long, but it is art’s inherent crisis itself. If art has a ‘holy’ mission, it is to keep that crisis on the agenda of modernity. (shrink)

Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, however, is (...) not simply located in its object, in the cruelty of what happened in the camp. The Shoah makes us at the same time facing the unimaginable ‘real’ of the modern subject—the blind spot in our own identity. If we need imagination to deal with the Shoah, it is also because of an ungraspable ‘real’ in ourselves. This is why adequate Shoah representations, acknowledging their object as being beyond representation, include the same ‘beyond’ concerning the subject of the Holocaust memory. The essay makes this clear in an elaborated comparison of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film, Shoah, with some conceptual works of art from the late nineties—all of this ‘fine-tuned’ in a reflection upon Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine how Ricœur’s critique of Husserl’s and Levinas’s notions of intersubjectivity informs his own alternative conceptualization of the intra- and interpersonal as a complex intertwining of moral selfhood and a just community. My first assumption is that law, as a prescriptive intervention in the social structure of our communal life, presupposes a phenomenology of our “being with others”. My second assumption is that Ricœur’s entire philosophical anthropology, and specifically his ideas on ethics, legality (...) and justice, can be read as a prolonged response to Husserl’s solipsistic deadlock in the famous Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Taken together these two assumptions connect Ricœur’s early analysis of phenomenology with his complex reconceptualization of moral selfhood in Oneself as Another, culminating in the ethical maxim of “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was "before philosophy." In Philosophy before the Greeks, Marc Van De Mieroop, an acclaimed historian of the ancient Near East, presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people (...) had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. Van De Mieroop uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth. The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

Par bien des aspects, Nietzsche peut être considéré comme un philosophe prophétique, même s'il n'emploie lui-même pour se caractériser que la formule « poète-prophète ». Mais, au regard de la conséquence nécessaire de sa conception de la volonté de puissance — à savoir, la doctrine de l'éternel retour —, il devient difficile de maintenir un statut de prophétisme réel dans la mesure où Nietzsche, avec cette doctrine, entend saisir l'unique dynamique possible de l'histoire comme succession de conversions de valeurs, et (...) sauver tout le passé devenu tout aussi nécessaire que l'avenir est prévisible. In good many aspects, Nietzsche could be considered as a prophetic philosopher, even if he uses for characterizing himself only « poet-prophet » formula. But in view of the necessary consequences of his will to power conception, i. e. the eternal return doctrine, a status of real prophetism could be hardly maintained insofar as Nietzsche, with this doctrine, means to understand the only possible dynamics of history as a succession of transvaluations, and to save all the past, turned as necessary as the future is forseable. (shrink)

Im Jahre 1886 erregte I. Hilberg großes Aufsehen, als er in einem Artikel über die Autorschaft des Christus patiens auf die verschiedene Behandlung der dichrona bei den Jambographen der byzantinischen Epoche hinwies – die bis heute herrschende Anschauung geht dahin, dass α, ι und υ bei den byzantinischen Jambographen ausnahmslos mittelzeitig sind – und, je nach der absoluten Korrektheit in der Versifikation, sowohl was die Quantität als was die Zäsuren betraf, die Autoren in drei Gruppen meinte einreihen zu können: die (...) Classiker, die Epigonen und die Stümper. P. Maas griff diesen Standpunkt quasi unmittelbar an; er bemerkte sarkastisch, dass in diesem Fall Georgios Pisides, umstrahlt von der Glorie reinster Quantität einsam über allen anderen Dichtern in der einsamen Höhe seines „klassischen“ Himmels thronen würde, und dass die Byzantiner in Wirklichkeit von der Quantität der Vokale nichts hörten, da dieselben einfach isochron geworden waren. Dies hat nicht verhindert, dass F. Scheidweiler lange danach doch untersucht hat, ob die Poesie des Joannes Geometres noch der antiken Quantitätslehre entspricht, oder konkreter: dem Metrum des jambischen Trimeters:In diesem Beitrag möchte ich, mit den Untersuchungen von Scheidweiler als Richtschnur, der Frage nachgehen, in welchem Maβe der Dichter in seiner Μετάφϱασις των ώδων tatsächlich noch die antike Metrik respektiert. (shrink)

Joannes Geometres gehörte als einer der führenden Rhetoriker und Dichter seiner Zeit und als Offizier in der byzantinischen Armee – ϰαί σοφίη θάλλων ϰαί τόλμη ϰϱαδίης – zur politischen und literarischen Elite Konstantinopels. Nicht lange vor dem Jahr 986 wurde er aus dem Militärdienst entlassen; wie er selbst zu verstehen gibt, lag seine Tätigkeit als Soldat und Dichter, die bei seinen Zeitgenossen Neid ausgelöst hätte, diesem Ereignis zugrunde; die wirkliche Ursache war aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach jedoch seine Sympathie für Basileios Nothos, (...) der seit 976 de facto als Kaiser des Reiches aufgetreten war, 985 aber gestürzt wurde. Wie dem auch sei, Joannes verließ seine luxuriöse Wohnung im Mesomphalos-Bezirk der Metropole und zog sich als Mönch ins Kloster Τα Κύϱου zurück; möglicherweise bekam er infolgedessen seinen zweiten Namen: Kyriotes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the seventeenth century, when the modern Self emerged in the shape of a self-assured Cartesian cogito, a radically opposite movement of ‘emptying’ or ‘deconstructing’ that Self took place. The religious subject, having become modern, understood its ultimate aim as becoming selfless. The battlefield on which the new subject fought the fight with its own modern condition was the issue of ‘love’. ‘What is the status of his Self when it is involved in the act of love?’ was the central (...) question in seventeenth century religiosity. This essay examines the early modern idea of pur amour and focuses only on two voices in the Querelle Du Quiétisme, François de Fénelon and Nicolas Malebranche. Fénelon vehemently defended the pur amour, a concept he adopted from a century-long tradition of spirituality in France and which he tried to explain and legitimize in a systematic and theoretical way. Malebranche was highly critical of that tradition, but refused neither to use the term nor to refer to the ideal of pur amour. His interpretation of the Self, however, forced him to draw different conclusions on the nature of pure love. (shrink)

‘Subject of one’s acts’: Lacanian reflections on a Foucauldian art of living In Les aveux de la chair, the fourth volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault explains how the still dominant idea that man is ‘subject of desire’ – and thus subjected to the law of desire – has its origin in the libido theory of Augustine. With this genealogical analysis Foucault targets, among other things, the libido theory of his contemporary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This essay briefly (...) discusses what makes Lacan and Foucault theoretically opposed to each other. I zoom in on how both conceive the modern ‘subject’. Opposite to the subject as ‘subject to desire’, Foucault puts forward the ‘subject of one’s own actions’, the subject that is itself the ground/base of its own ‘care for oneself’ (epimileia heautou). This essay presents a critical reflection on the possibility of such a subject. It is here that Lacan’s theory of the subject can shed a light on Foucault’s understanding of a modern ‘care of oneself’ or ‘art of living’. Lacanian psychoanalysis can provide a ‘critical theory’, indispensable for what is at stake in a Foucauldian ‘art of living’. (shrink)

Leo Strauss reconnaît, en 1970, qu'il doit tout ce qu'il a découvert d'important en matière de discours exotérique à Lessing. La présente étude cherche à montrer d'abord le bien-fondé de cette affirmation en explorant ce que le jeune Strauss a pu puiser chez Lessing dans les travaux qui l'occupèrent de 1921 à 1937. Cet examen nous conduit aussi à ce qu'ont pu dire de Lessing Rosenzweig et Cohen (et qui va dans le sens de ce que Strauss en comprenait) qu'aux (...) textes de Lessing luimême où, effectivement, Strauss a considérablement puisé, et qui sont bien l'une des sources principales de ses problématiques et de ses orientations. Leo Strauss, in 1970, admits that everything of importance that he discovered in the field of esoteric discourse he owes to Lessing. This study (the following study) attempts to show, first off, the validity of this statement by examining what the young Strauss could have drawn from Lessing in the work that occupied him from 1921 to 1937. This includes what Rosenzweig and Cohen may have said of Lessing (more or less what Strauss himself understood of him), as well as Lessing's own texts from which Strauss did draw considerably, which are surely one of the principal sources of his problematics and orientations. (shrink)

The poetical corpus of 11th-c. Christopher Mitylenaios, such as it is found in manuscript No. Z α XXIX (13th c.) of the Biblioteca della Badia Greca in Grottaferrata, consists of 145 poems and 2856 verses. Of these carmina 123 are written in jambic trimeters, 18 in dactylic hexameters, three in elegiac distichs, and one in an Anacreontic metre. In the first part of the article outer metric is discussed; among other things one learns that the Anacreontic poem 75 forms metrically (...) a case of its own as it consists of eight strophes of four verses each, whereby the even strophes are followed by two so-called koukoullia, that the dactylic hexameters use 28 out of 32 possible schemes, thus contrasting with the Callimachean and Nonnian types, and that in the dodecasyllables the so-called Binnenschluss after the 5th foot is overwhelmingly present while in no less than 16 hexameters the poet uses a caesura after the 3rd foot. In the second part (inner metric) the numerous transgressions of metrical laws are investigated, as well as verse end and accentuation, and prosody; this last item concerns long and short vowels, diphthongs and dichrona, correptio Attica and hiatus. The text ends with a twofold appendix about caesurae. (shrink)

Religion plays a crucial role in the critical dimension of Pasolini’s movies. Yet the religion performed there is a thoroughly ‘pagan’ religion, a religion that is itself not critical at all. The question to be raised is why Pasolini does not refer to the ‘monotheistic’ kind of religion, which is critical – and even religion critical – in its core. The article tries to develop an answer to that question by means of patient and profound reflection upon Pasolini’s definition of (...) ‘God’ as “a dream that allows no sleep and from which one cannot waken”. (shrink)

iek's thinking departs from the Lacanian claim that we live in a symbolic order, not a real world, and that the Real is what we desire, but can never know or grasp. There is a fundamental virtuality of reality that points to the lie in every truth-claim, and there are two ways of dealing with this:repression and denial. An ideology, a system or a regime becomes totalitarian when it denies the virtual character of both its world and its subject (democracy (...) represses truth's basic lie, which makes it possible for the repressed to return). iek's analysis of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, shows how a totalitarian system denies its subject, which, being desire for the Real, cannot act in the name of truth but must acknowledge the contingency of its action (a political act can fail to reach its goal), whereas an established system can no longer fail and has to deny its flaws. Any political act disrupts the (evolution of) the symbolic order and thus is revolutionary, creating an event ex nihilo. An act is a jump into the inconsistency of the symbolic order, i.e. into das Ding, a jump both into and out of the nihil in which our world is grounded. Politics therefore can never be Realpolitik. The realization that politics is a symbolic phenomenon, supported not by the real, but by signifiers, is the Lacanian foundation of iek's political theory. (shrink)

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Alain Badiou’s philosophy is an attempt to re-establish truth in modern thought. The main – and indeed sole – criterion for truth is universality, he argues in all of his works, including the one on Saint Paul on which this essay focuses. In this book, Badiou argues that most of Saint Paul’s doctrinal topics can be related to the main concerns of his own thought. Thus Paul’s belief in Christ’s resurrection illustrates his own theory of the ‘event’; Paul’s characterization of (...) the church is linked with his own theory of the subject; and, finally, Paul’s entire intervention can be seen as one of the first affirmations in history of truth’s main criterion: universality. This article demonstrates how an unarticulated assumption secretly sustains Badiou’s entire theoretical framework: his belief in universal truth is supported by a belief in being’s inherent goodness. Badiou’s ‘ontology’ thus appears not so exclusively formal as he claims. Through a confrontation between Badiou’s interpretation of Paul and a reading of chapter eleven in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the essay shows how the universality that Paul’s text claims contains an important element that Badiou’s reading – and his entire philosophy – neglects. This element involves a distorted dialectics that has resonances with both the Derridean concept of the ‘originary supplement’ and Lacan’s notion of ‘objet petit a’. The essay closes with some critical reflections on the way Badiou connects truth with time. (shrink)