Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek

At the intersection of "the theological" and "the political," the situatedness of the sovereign dictates the task and method of political theology. It is the sovereign, in particular, positioned between "the theological" and "the political," that is responsible for existentializing what is theologized and what is politicized through the power of sovereignty. Through this sovereignty, the sovereign creates, defines, and oversees all the existential dimensions of a theological-political environment, especially with respect to exclusiveness and inclusiveness, marginalization and belongingness, and what is accomplished by the state of exception. To understand the nuances of what a sovereign is and how sovereignty operates, as the one that develops the state of exception through an act of exception, this essay will examine the explicit and implicit political theologies articulated by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in an effort to construct Slavoj Žižek's political theology from Schmitt's sentiment about "the one who decides on the exception" and Agamben's conceptualization of "zoē" and "bios." From Schmitt and Agamben, Žižek's political theology makes use of the dialectic and references to notions of symptom and trauma, which ultimately culminates in a religious-oriented understanding of the sovereign's act of exception as the "theologico-political suspension of the ethical."

Nomi Claire Lazar seeks to clarify the multitude of ways in which we mark, measure, and shape time in politics. She argues that (a) we experience time only in the shapes or forms that we give it, and; (b) to shape time is to connect it to things outside of time, such as natural or cultural marks. While this framing is unavoidable, it can go awfully wrong as in primitivist thought that connects shaped time with a supposedly pure or natural timeless origin, and eschatological thought that connects it with a perfectly just timeless time to come. I seek to complement Lazar’s excellent analysis of the politics of time, which seeks to draw out meaning in time, with an analysis of the philosophy of time, or the meaning of time. I argue that primitivist and eschatological thought can give a direct contribution to our thinking about time if it is able to cultivate a distance between philosophy and politics.

Dialectics of the fable
"The Matrix", A philosophical Machine
By Alain Badiou

“Nevertheless we must recognise that the three films have a problem in common, which is simply the fundamental problem of cognition: what is it that, from within our own capacity to know testifies that is indeed the real that is at stake in our cognition?”(Badiou, 2004)

How do these 3 movies ("The Matrix", "Cube","eXistenZ") philosophically distinguish what is real and what's not?

True to his early Schellingian roots, Slavoj Zizek (2020, 78), in his recent book, Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World describes a virus as "a kind of zero-level life," invoking Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Perhaps the closest reference, though Zizek did not mention it, is his second major work on the subject, namely, First Outline of A System of the Philosophy of Nature (written in 1799) where Schelling originally propounded the theory of nature's 'duplicity' (Schelling 2004). In the following discussions, we will situate Zizek's timely intervention within the context of his naturalism that politically mediates the differential flows of the present world (capitalism, not to mention) and the subject itself, against the background of a space of difference between the two, whereby the virus acts as a kind of deferral mechanism in which something like the future is suspended, finally rendering the relation motionless. The discussions will also briefly situate Zizek's political naturalism within contemporary political discourse involving some of his direct and indirect engagements with Agamben, Latour, Badiou, Berardi, Deleuze (especially concerning the latter's vitalism), and others. This critical review stakes out a view of Zizek's recent intervention as a timely polemics, consistent with his global image as one of the most dependable public intellectuals of our troubled time.

This study evaluates three literary theorists' attempt at deciphering the role of literature and literary studies today. These include Latinamericanist Alberto Moreiras, post-colonial thinker Gayatri Spivak, and literary critic Ottmar Ette. This evaluation is performed with the goal of understand each participant's position vis-à-vis the literary, academic, and environmental crises that the world is experiencing since the past century. Additionally, considerable attention is also dedicated to two thinkers of contemporary continental philosophy: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. This is done with the purpose of analyzing art's relationship to subjectivity-and in this specific context art, reflection and dialogue-about energy sources that reveal our unhealthy dependence to fossil fuels and our unexamined habits.

Two urgent questions impel this thinking of thinkable politics: How did we get from EDSA to Duterte? What can I do? These questions are wistfully underpinned by a third: Whatever happened to my/the politics that, for me/for a multitude, was compelled by EDSA and cannot be other than emancipatory? These are obviously practical questions. However, they are also eminently and imminently theoretical. Thus, reiterated philosophically: What explains this moment of danger that has taken hold of our present? What is the politics adequate to this danger but at the same time excessive of the persistent moment, so much so that it explodes this untenable reality and open our present to the trajectory of the new? The philosophical answer is provided by Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the state of emergency that we live is not the exception but the rule, and his revelation that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency that will help the fight against fascism. Dito sa bayan nating sawi,* the contention is that the state of emergency that is the rule is normalized emergency. This normalized emergency is structured by middle class fantasy production post-EDSA. Only the naming of EDSA as an event and the militants for its truth are what can measure up to this normalized emergency and its organizing fantasies.—These assertions are explored through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of exception, Slavoj Zizek’s concept of fantasy, and Alain Badiou’s metaontology and his concepts of event and subject. The point, as was Benjamin’s, is to improve our position in our fight against this contemporary conflation of state terror and fantasy bewitchment that is named Duterte.
* here in our unfortunate country

CAVALCANTI, Rodrigo de Camargo; CASTANHATO, Camila. Análise Jurídico-Ideológica da Música “O Drama da Humana Manada” de El Efecto. In: GUERRA FILHO, Willis Santiago (coord.). CANTARINI, Paola; SERAU JUNIOR, Marco Aurélio (orgs.) Direito e Música Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris, 2019.

Kosmos und Subjektivität – dieses Begriffspaar stellt sogleich einen Antagonismus vor, denn Subjektivität konstituiert sich alleine im irreduziblen Bruch mit der kosmischen Einheit. Gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts kommt es zu diesem Bruch, der sich durch ein Ineinanderwirken von wissenschaftlichen, philosophischen und ästhetischen Diskursen auszeichnet. Als entscheidender Schritt dieser Entwicklung, so die These der Untersuchung, lässt sich die Frühromantik verstehen: Sie insistiert zum einen auf dem Bruch mit der tradierten Vorstellung des Kosmos und entdeckt darin die Möglichkeitsbedingung moderner Subjektivität. Zum anderen hat sie die Erfahrung einer solchen Destruktion noch zur Voraussetzung ihrer eigenen Poetik.

How can a set throw itself into itself and remain a set and an element of itself at the same tim e? This is obviously impossible, as Bertrand Russell has prominently shown. One simply cannot pic a trash can up and throw it into itself. Now, Hegel and Badiou, but also the anti-Hegelian W. Benjamin, take different positions on the subject when they refer time and again to versions of “concrete universality” as an oxymoronic structure that touches ontologically upon their theoretical as well as their practical philosophies. The article tries to show how the philosophers affirm the mentioned paradox as central for the understanding of DialecticalMaterialism in its classical (nineteenth-century) as well as in its modern (twentieth-century)and contemporary (twenty-first-century) understanding.

O presente artigo apresenta uma crítica à percepção de que o projeto de inclusão universal pela via legal- institucional é eficaz. A partir da análise da sociedade e das contradições relacionadas a oportunidade de trabalho, miséria e índices de violência, é possível identificar a insuficiência do papel garantidor do Estado

"Badiou, The Event, and Psychiatry, Part 2: Psychiatry of the Event"
by Vincenzo Di Nicola

In: RELIGIOUS THEORY
E-SUPPLEMENT TO THE JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS THEORY, December 23, 2018

This is the second part in a two-part instalment.

This article was originally published online in the blog of the American Philosophical Association, November 2017.

http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2018/12/23/badiou-the-event-and-psychiatry-part-2-vincenzo-di-nicola/

"Badiou, The Event, and Psychiatry, Part 1: Trauma and Event"
by Vincenzo Di Nicola

In: RELIGIOUS THEORY,
E-SUPPLEMENT TO THE JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS THEORY, December 15, 2018

This is the first part in a two-part instalment.

This article was originally published online in the blog of the American Philosophical Association, November 2017.

http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2018/12/15/badiou-the-event-and-psychiatry-part-1-vincenzo-di-nicola/

LA PSYCHIATRIE CONTRE ELLE-MÊME
Radicaux, rebelles, réformateurs et révolutionnaires

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Résumé

Ce séminaire inverse la logique de l’antipsychiatrie et décrit les différents mouvements critiques de la profession : la psychiatrie contre elle-même. Pareil au contraste des philosophes avec les antiphilosophes d’Alain Badiou, les antipsychiatres poussent la tradition établie de la psychiatrie à confronter les difficultés qui apparaissent avec de nouvelles perspectives pour relancer la pensée psychiatrique. Le double thème qui émerge de cette étude : tradition contre innovation et négation contre affirmation.

Cette thèse est composée de trois parties : (1) L’enjeu intriguant des psychiatres associés au mouvement antipsychiatrique est la négation qui les unit. Dans chaque cas, leur travail procède par une négation clé critique, au point que la caractéristique déterminante des psychiatres en antipsychiatrie devient la négation elle-même. (2) Chaque négation transforme chaque antipsychiatre à un rebelle, un radical, un réformateur ou un antipsychiatre révolutionnaire. (3) Chaque antipsychiatre a brandi un instrument, que j’ai nommé la faucille de Badiou, pour provoquer un changement. En se basant sur une négation clé critique, chaque antipsychiatre a résisté à la suture représentée par la psychiatrie d’une sous-discipline donnée, d’une pratique régionale, ou d’une idéologie dominante en la divisant doucement ou brutalement avec le scalpel, les ciseaux, les cisailles, la faux ou la faucille de Badiou pour libérer la psychiatrie en termes de théorie et de pratique générale, et la retourner à sa mission originaire.

Quatre psychiatres réputés occidentaux du XXe siècle, qui avaient critiqué leur domaine, sont étudiés à travers leurs attitudes fondamentales et leurs contributions à la redéfinition de la psychiatrie. L’Écossais Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) était un psychiatre-psychanalyste radical qui a retourné la psychiatrie à ses racines cliniques en faisant appel à la phénoménologie sociale et en niant la mystification de la maladie mentale en plaçant la souffrance de soi dans son contexte social, familial et politique. Le Français Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) était à la fois un psychanalyste subversif et un rebelle de la psychiatrie qui a confirmé la centralité de Freud dans sa construction de la psychanalyse tout en se rebellant contre l’établissement de la psychanalyse et celui de la psychiatrie, en niant l’institutionnalisation de la pratique psychanalytique. Le psychiatre Italien Franco Basaglia (1924-1980), réformateur, il a été l’instigateur de la désinstitutionnalisation psychiatrique à travers le monde avec son texte clé, L’Istituzione negata, « L’institution en négation » (1968) et en se joignant à la Partie Radicale du Parlement italien qui a réformé la législation de la santé mentale en Italie. À titre de psychiatre, philosophe et révolutionnaire, le Martiniquais Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) a contesté, rien de moins que la réclamation de la psychiatrie européenne à l’universalisme dans ses critiques radicales de la psychologie de la colonisation et la formation d’identité, en offrant une psychologie plus humaine sur laquelle on bâtirait la psychiatrie dans un programme révolutionnaire pour une nouvelle société.

Deux autres penseurs d’esprit critique sont examinés. Il s’agit du Hongrois-Américain Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) que je définis comme un psychiatre réactionnaire sous la forme d’un progressiste qui a dénoncé la réalité des troubles psychiatriques. Contrairement aux autres antipsychiatres, la négation de Szasz a été destructive, en donnant lieu à une plus grande stigmatisation de la maladie mentale et en diminuant les ressources et les services. Finalement, le travail du psychologue et philosophe Français Michel Foucault (1926-1984) qui éclipse le discours au complet de l’antipsychiatrie, quand il nous informe et incite à remettre de l’ordre dans les perceptions médicales et la pensée psychiatrique, en bouleversant « l’ordre des choses », au sens strict du terme. La négation de Foucault était la plus perturbante à la pensée psychiatrique car il mettait en cause la base même d’avoir imaginé la folie et la raison/déraison.

Daniel Adleman's chapter explores J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace as an imaginative rearticulation of Sophocles's Antigone. According to Adleman's reading, David Lurie's conservative utopian fantasy of a place (topos), or occupational sphere, insulated against all potential onslaughts is situated situated at violent cross-currents with its raced, gendered, classed, and even speciesed blindspots. Adleman posits that Coetzee’s novel figures a countervailing thanatopian mode of dissidence that reverberates through the Occupy and Idle No More movements. This seemingly futile thanatopian striving, Adleman argues, orients itself away from the neoliberal extraction of value and circulation of goods toward the generation of new values and ceaseless reconstitution of “the Good.”