To what question is the Badiouan notion of the subject an answer? On the dialectical elaboration of the concept in his early work

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Jan-Jasper Persijn

Alain Badiou’s elaboration of a subject faithful to an event is commonly known today in the academic world and beyond. However, his first systematic account of the subject ( Théorie du Sujet) was already published in 1982 and did not mention the ‘event’ at all. Therefore, this article aims at tracing back both the structural and the historical conditions that directed Badiou’s elaboration of the subject in the early work up until the publication of L’Être et l’Événément in 1988. On the one hand, it investigates to what extent the (early) Badiouan subject can be considered an exceptional product of the formalist project of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse as instigated by psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan) and a certain Marxist discourse (Althusser) insofar as both were centered upon a theory of the subject. On the other hand, this article examines the radical political implications of this subject insofar as Badiou has directed his philosophical aims towards the political field as a direct consequence of the events of May ’68.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Dariusz Dąbrowski

The main goal of the article is to present the possibilities and methods of research on the Rurikid’s matrimonial policy in the Middle Ages on the example of a selected group of princes. As the subject of studies were chosen Mstislav Vladimirovich and his children. In total, 12 matrimonial relationships were included. The analysis of the source material revealed very unfavorable phenomena from the perspective of the topic under study. The Rus’ primary sources gave information on the conclusion of just four marriages out of twelve. The next four matrimonial arrangement inform foreign sources (Scandinavian and Norman). It should be emphasized particularly strongly that – save for two exceptions of Scandinavian provenance – the sources convey no information whatsoever as regards the political aims behind this or that marriage agreement. It appears, then, that the chroniclers of the period and cultural sphere in question did not regard details concerning marriages (such as their circumstances or the reasons behind them) as “information notable enough to be worth preserving”. Truth be told, even the very fact of the marriage did not always belong to this category. Due to the state of preservation of primary sources the basic question arises as to whether it is possible to study the Rurikids’ matrimonial policy? In spite of the mercilessly sparse source material, it is by all means possible to conduct feasible research on the Rurikids’ marriage policy. One must know how to do it right, however. Thus, such studies must on the one hand be rooted in a deep knowledge of the relevant sources (not only of Rus’ provenance) as well as the ability to subject them to astute analysis; on the other hand, they must adhere to the specially developed methodology, presented in the first part of the article.


Author(s):  
Arnold Anthony Schmidt

This chapter takes an original approach to Byron’s much-discussed engagement with the early Risorgimento by focusing not on biographical aspects, but rather on formal issues. It centres on The Two Foscari in the context of the highly politicised contemporary Italian critical debates about the dramatic unities. In this fashion, it teases out the political implications of Byron’s adherence to the unities by comparing his play to Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola, which programmatically violates them. Focusing specifically on the playwrights’ representations of the fifteenth-century mercenary leader, Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, the chapter explores these writers’ use or abuse of the unity of time, in particular. In doing so, it throws light on, and contrasts, Manzoni’s Risorgimento agenda on the one hand and Byron’s generally sceptical attitude about leadership and uncertainty about social and political change on the other.


Author(s):  
Antonio Hermosa Andújar

In this work the author holds the thesis that with Maquiavelo, in accordance with Tucidides, the complete humanization of history and human life arose. Man has become the complete owner of his destiny when conquering fortune by virtù, that is, the entirety of social forces, concrete or diffuse, that oppose to the exercise of his will. It is only nature that remains as a region still inaccessible to human will. This is the reason why in Maquiavelo the concepts which should organize the explanation of human behavior are not, as considered until now, virtù/fortune but virtù/nature. Even though, there are two antagonic limits to the emancipatory virtuos action: on the one hand, its still nondemocratic condition, since only the Prince is capable of such virtù. On the other, the political liberty, something that in principle appears external to the subject, but once known he won´t forget ever, that is, political liberty becomes a constitutive feature of the human being at which every virtuos action of the Prince directed to extirpate it, fails.


1980 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 427-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertrand de Jouvenel

SINCE FIRST I BEGAN TO THINK ABOUT THE SUBJECT OF WHAT I called ‘pure politics’ twenty years ago, it has, sad to say, become more immediate. This is because of something I emphasized at the time: the effectiveness of a dedicated group of activists. Although few in number, the group's intensity of will gives it a formidable strength. It is like a projectile which can easily penetrate the soft body of society. It is the generator of the unforeseen, and ushers drama on to the political stage. In my book De la Souveraineté (1955), I contrasted two pictures familiar to us since childhood: Bonaparte on the bridge at Arcola and Saint Louis under the oak tree at Vincennes. The first is standing erect, calling on his men to charge; the other is seated, serene, welcoming the various plaintiffs who press towards him and sending them away content. On one side of the diptych we see a leader who exalts, and on the other side an umpire who corrects and conciliates – an agent of momentum and an agent of equilibrium. Bonaparte points to a direction and the narrowness of the bridge is a symbol of the one-way narrow track, the precise intention. In contrast, the oak tree is the centre of a circumference, from every point of which the plaintiffs or suitors could approach, so that the king's attention was called from all sides: he needed the eyes of Argus.


Author(s):  
Y. Zelenin ◽  
◽  
A. Vasiliev ◽  
Y.V. Pechatnova ◽  
◽  
...  

The question of defining own national identity is a kind of prism with the help of which consideration, estimation and research of many important features of modern political and legal life of Turkic-Mongolian peoples are possible. That is why at present it is important to trace the foundations of the ideological-value factor, continuity and preservation of traditional and legal institutions of the peoples of the Turkic-Mongolian world. The aim of the study is to analyse the main scientific ideas about the degree of continuity and the possibility of preserving traditional political and legal values in the countries of the Turkic-Mongolian world in the context of globalisation. The authors have assessed the degree of study of the subject of research, highlighted the main scientific ideas, analyzed the possibility of preserving traditional values of the Turkic-Mongolian world in the context of globalization. In the course of the study, proven scientific principles of pluralism of political and legal cultures and historicism, cultural and civilizational approach, historical, hermeneutic, comparative and formal-legal methods were used. As a result of the study, the authors conclude that, on the one hand, the specific functioning of the political and legal institutions of the Turkic-Mongol world is based on the desire to maintain their independence and autonomy from the influence of external forces, but on the other hand, the imitation of Western-oriented narratives is traced with varying degrees of success


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 442-456
Author(s):  
Margarita Bayutova ◽  
◽  

In the article the author considers the problem of using art as the political power instrument. The subject of the study is the analysis of applied arts possibilities as a means of political propaganda and agitation, the necessary qualities and political views formation in a person. The material for the analysis is the Soviet propaganda porcelain of the 1920s. The choice of this material is caused, firstly, by its great visibility in the framework of the discussed problem, and, secondly, by the negative result of its use in real politics (at first sight, paradoxical). At present, Soviet propaganda porcelain is considered to be a “unique phenomenon” of Russian and world art. However, the main reason for its appearance at the beginning of the 20th century was not the search for new art forms. After coming to power in 1917, the Bolshevists faced the need to form political views of the citizens that were compatible with the party course — in general, to form a “new man” capable of living in a new society. On the one hand, porcelain was a random choice at that period of time (1920-s) but, on the other hand, people assigned specific characteristics to it as a type of applied art. And, therefore, they ascribed to it the possibilities of an instrument of political power. But at the same time using it in that capacity is greatly limited due to other specific properties, as well as due to other historical circumstances. The main reason for the failure of Soviet propaganda porcelain as the political propaganda and agitation means is the contradiction between the course of political power and the essence of porcelain as a phenomenon, i.e. inconsistency between the goal and the means to achieve it. In general, the author draws a conclusion that there is a difference between the goals of art and power and, as a consequence, the groundlessness of the power attempts to consider art exclusively as its own tool.


1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-230
Author(s):  
Ephraim Emerton

The decade just passed has witnessed an unusual activity in the production of books about Martin Luther. This activity has been greatly stimulated by the re-introduction of a method of controversy which reasonable men had been hoping was forever silenced. Until about a generation ago there had been two obvious and hopelessly opposed ways of approach to the subject of Luther's character and work. From the one side he was presented as an angel of light; from the other as the type of a depraved and malicious spirit, moved to activity not through any desire to improve the condition of his people but because, being the malignant thing he was, he could not act otherwise. It need hardly be said to the readers of this Review that both of these views of Luther are essentially false. They are perfectly intelligible, one equally with the other. They are the natural precipitation of the bitter controversies that gathered about him in his life, and continued long after his death to complicate the political and economic struggles out of which the new Europe of our day was born. In the light of our modern historical method, both views appear crude and unscientific. They represent a way of looking at historical characters and historical events to which we are apt to apply the crushing word “old-fashioned.” And in fact it did seem, up to a very few years ago, that these primitive judgments, which classified men into good and bad, angels and fiends, had become a thing of the past.


Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam

The introduction begins by arguing that political theory has been driven by base assumptions concerning the agency and transparency of the subject. Such assumptions are what were challenged by Marxist thinking, which, through the failure of the revolution to materialise in industrialised nations, instigated a more refined turn to ideology in the works of the neo-Marxists. Arguing this turn is limited in its focus on pre-conscious interests, I outline post-Marxism as an attempt to move towards an analysis of unconscious libidinal investments, which also signifies a turn to human ontology. The ontological turn faces a split, however, been transcendence on the one hand an immanence on the other. In exploring the two positions, it is argued that immanence has been rejected to the point of vindicating of transcendence as a necessary position in order to conceptualise the political. The chapter ends by arguing that this rejection and the related vindication, is premised a gross misreading and misunderstanding of immanence; that immanence is the ontological centre of micropolitics as that which precedes the politics of identity and representation. Moreover, this is an ontology that, at least insofar as it concerns the political, starts with Sartre and is developed by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze.


Numen ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy Sudário Cabral

Este artigo analisa a obra de Dostoiévski, Memórias do Subsolo, apresentando o universo filosófico e político no qual se deu a sua gestação. A pequena novela traz consigo o confronto entre as principais ideologias políticas da Rússia do século XIX, colocando frente a frente materialismo versus romantismo, oferecendo o cenário do encarniçado conflito entre os chamados homens novos, da geração de 1860, e os representantes da geração de 1840, reconhecidos como homens supérfluos. O artigo está dividido em dois atos e procura descrever os distintos núcleos narrativos que organizam a primeira parte da obra, intitulada “O subsolo”, e a segunda parte, “A propósito da neve molhada”. Após apresentar os singulares universos filosóficos e políticos nos quais a novela está inserida, o artigo procura demonstrar o lugar explosivo desta narrativa, que foi articulada como crítica religiosa e núcleo de desconstrução das virtudes estéticas e políticas da modernidade.The present article analyses Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, presenting the political and philosophical atmosphere which conditioned its genealogy. This short novel highlights the conflict between the main political ideologies in Russia during the 19th century, putting face-to-face materialism versus romanticism and presenting the terrible conflict that took place between the so-called “new men” belonging to the generation of the1860s, and the representatives of the generation of the 1840s, known as the “superfluous men”. The article is divided in two main parts and it seeks to describe the distinct narrative frames which structure, on the one hand, the first part intituled “The Underground”, and, on the other, the second part intituled “On the Subject of the Wet Snow”. After describing the distinct philosophical and political contexts within which the novel is set, the article tries to demonstrate that the narrative is deliberately woven in order to function as a religious critique and an instrument to deconstruct the esthetical and political virtues of modernity.


1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Flaningam

The occasional conformity controversy has been the subject of considerable study by historians, both contemporary and modern. However, recent research has tended to concentrate on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of the issue, with somewhat less attention given to its importance as an ideological question. Nevertheless, the latter aspect of the controversy is well worth examining, for aside from its impact upon the struggle for office and power, occasional conformity was also the subject of heated debate on the theoretical and philosophical level. And although this debate often degenerated into partisan diatribes and rhetoric, it also raised questions that transcended the political ploy on the one hand, and the theologian's quibble and the propagandist's stalking horse on the other. The arguments used by both sides during the controversy revealed the basic philosophical differences that lay at the heart of the rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Occasional conformity's role as an expression of, and its relation to, this struggle is the subject of this article.The ideological debate over occasional conformity was necessarily stimulated by the parliamentary struggles during the first decade of the eighteenth century over the various bills which were designed to discourage the practice, and many of the tracts on the subject were written in response to these and other political maneuvers. But the pamphlet war had its own distinct existence, and the writers involved fought with their pens a battle that was parallel to the one that the politicians were fighting with votes and influence.


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