The Unprecedented Return of St. Paul

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregg Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Alain Badiou

This statement takes up the frequency of contemporary philosophers who have returned to the epistles of St. Paul as the basis for a philosophy of truth and history. The chapter provides a close reading of an example in the recent writings of French philosopher Alain Badiou

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Coombs
Keyword(s):  
Set Theory ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Irrational Numbers ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Quantitative Properties

This chapter locates the roots of the Marxist theory of revolutionary change in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. In the well-known formula, cumulative changes in quantitative properties give rise to a qualitative leap into the future. However, the chapter argues that the idea rests on shaky ontological foundations. Through a close reading of the Science of Logic, it is shown that Hegel’s idea of leaps relies on excising irrational numbers. To make his dialectical transitions work, Hegel has to dialecticise the mathematical infinite and ignore scientific epistemological breaks from the classical period onwards. This compares unfavourably to Alain Badiou, who makes Georg Cantor’s breakthrough with transfinite set theory the lynchpin for his discontinuous philosophy of events. The final section argues that Hegel’s notion of quantity to quality leaps is also complicit with the reformism and technological determinism promoted by key thinkers of Second International Marxism.

scholarly journals Effectively Equivalent

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-198
Author(s):  
SIGI JÖÖTTKANDT
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Central Place ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Primary Producer

Walter Pater's theoretical "come-back" over the past forty years or so has been dominated by the competing claims of the new historicism and deconstruction, both of which discover prescient forerunners of their own, seemingly mutually exclusive, theoretical concerns in Pater's aesthetic criticism and in his historical novel Marius the Epicurean(1885). Yet despite their obvious differences, both critical approaches share one thing in common: the same post-humanist denigration of the trope of metaphor in favor of the seemingly more ethically responsive (because inclusive) trope of metonymy. In this essay I observe how the new historicism's and deconstruction's privilegings of metonymy as the prime trope of difference poses an immediate problem for ethical thought that, largely under the influence of Alain Badiou, has become increasingly cognizant of the need for a workable conception of sameness (or universality), traditionally supplied by metaphor. Accordingly, this close reading of the metaphorical dialectic of one of Pater's surprisingly underread Imaginary Portraits, "Sebastian van Storck" (1887), explores the basic charge against metaphor-namely, that it is an essentially"theological" trope insofar as it invariably pre-posits the "identity" that it modestly claims to have merely discovered. Employing the central figure of Sebastian's idealism-equation-I venture that, once rethought as a relation not of identity but of equivalence, metaphor is capable of shouldering the rhetorical burden of similarity without relinquishing its ethical claim as a primary producer of new differences in the world and is, hence, deserving of a central place in a post-deconstructive ethics.

Hegel, the Arts and Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Alex Ling ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Canonical Forms ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
New Development ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
End Of Art

Alain Badiou embarks on a close reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics to consider how his own recently-developed concept of the “index”—designating the crucial point of mediation between finite works and the absolute (or the means by which “works of art obtain their seal of absoluteness”)—might figure therein, as well as to explore what Hegel would have made of cinema, had he lived to experience it. After first examining the various ways that this “index of absoluteness” functions in the Hegelian conception of art—both according to its canonical forms (sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and poetry including theatre) and its historical classifications (classical, symbolic and romantic)—Badiou proceeds to investigate whether Hegel’s aesthetic system could and should have foreseen the eventual birth of cinema, together with its general characteristics; and whether this new development would ultimately refute or confirm his famous thesis on the end of art.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

The Time of Indifference: Mandelstam's Age, Badiou's Event, and Agamben's Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
William Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Time ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alain Badiou

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Age’, around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben's response, written after Badiou's, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou's conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event – although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and ‘now’ time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou's use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben's application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as ‘now’, through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben uses Mandelstam's poem to suspend the Western conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

The Sober Bacchae: Dance as Phenomenal Limitation in Nietzsche

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Monique Lyle
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Function ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy

This essay seeks to dispel entrenched critical opinion regarding dance across Nietzsche's writings as representative of Dionysian intoxication alone. Taking as its prompt the riposte of Alain Badiou, ‘Nietzsche is miles away from any doctrine of dance as a primitive ecstasy’ and ‘dance is in no way the liberated bodily impulse, the wild energy of the body’, the essay uncovers the ties between dance and Apollo in the Nietzschean theory of art while qualifying dance's relation to Dionysus. Primarily through an analysis of The Dionysiac World View and The Birth of Tragedy, the essay seeks to illuminate enigmatic statements about dance in Nietzsche (‘in dance the greatest strength is only potential, although it is betrayed by the suppleness of movement’ and ‘dance is the preservation of orderly measure’). It does this through an elucidation of the specific function of dance in Nietzsche's interpretation of classical Greece; via an assessment of the difficulties associated with the Nietzschean understanding of the bacchanal; and lastly through an analysis of Nietzsche's characterization of dance as a symbol. The essay culminates in a discussion of dance's ties to Nietzschean life affirmation; here the themes of physico-phenomenal existence, joy and illusion in Nietzsche are surveyed.

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