By examining the idea found in the works of several contemporary philosophers that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer merely possible – as it was for Leibniz – but actually determines our experience of reality, the article proposes an understanding of worlds as transcendental structures that frame the ontological multiplicity. The article argues that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that the concept of world should be seen today as a category that belongs to the (...) order of fiction, making the world-building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. The first part examines the conceptions of multiple worlds of Leibniz, Deleuze, and Badiou through the structural differences and similarities between possible and fictional worlds. While Deleuze actualises possible worlds, Badiou actualises fictional worlds. The second part explores worlds as political fictions, revisiting Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism via Rancière’s definition of politics as a conflict of worlds. Rancière’s formulation of political dissensus in fictional and narrative terms sheds a new light on Kant’s description of cosmopolitanism as a perspective that presents history as a novelistic narrative. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy and its conditions. The affirmation “mathematics is ontology”, which I posited thirty years ago, has certain inconveniences. In this article, I present six varying possibilities for ontology. My own philosophical decision was to proclaim that being is a pure multiplicity, without the One and without any specific attribute such as “matter” or “spirit”. This movement of thought brought me to study the mathematical condition of philosophy and to search for a rigorous structuration (...) of my speculative decision within the field of mathematics. However, my initial postulate that “Being is the multiplicity without the One” is not a mathematical but a philosophical statement. This paper concludes with a presentation of the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. (shrink)

In the logic of theory change, the standard model is AGM, proposed by Alchourrón et al. (J Symb Log 50:510–530, 1985 ). This paper focuses on the extension of AGM that accounts for contractions of a theory by a set of sentences instead of only by a single sentence. Hansson (Theoria 55:114–132, 1989 ), Fuhrmann and Hansson (J Logic Lang Inf 3:39–74, 1994 ) generalized Partial Meet Contraction to the case of contractions by (possibly non-singleton) sets of sentences. In this (...) paper we present the possible worlds semantics for partial meet multiple contractions. (shrink)

The essay discusses a significant shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation found in Alain Badiou’s ontology and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. From Heidegger to Deleuze, the artwork was able to express an ontological truth about the world on the condition that it does not represent it. Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ approach to ontology and Rancière’s redefinition of the modern aesthetic break with representation, however, suggest that there is nothing to express beyond the veil of representation. Instead, representation can only be (...) counteracted by the occurrence of surplus representations that subvert the principles of the dominant regime of representation. The essay provides an understanding of this shift by reversing the Leibnizian conceptual metaphor Adorno used to describe the modern artwork. Unlike ‘windowless monads’, whose seclusion from the world enables them to convey an ontological truth, artworks as ‘monadless windows’ reframe the parameters of what is perceived as reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Klossowski, Deleuze, and OrthodoxyEleanor Kaufman (bio)Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either (...) one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic.For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure.Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone [End Page 47] take the body down and have sex for the first time next to it. Then the narrator describes the boredom that ensues even in the face of death: "We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives" [59–60]. This is actually an unusually meditative moment in Bataille's story of murder, priests, bullfights, and constant sex.1 Here his narrator links boredom to death, and to a reflection on the absurd boundary between life and death. But by commenting on boredom... (shrink)

The canonical version of possible worlds semantics for story prefixes is due to David Lewis. This paper reassesses Lewis's theory and draws attention to some novel problems for his account.

Why Deleuze and Ricoeur? -- Fields for potential and possible connectors -- Investigative strategies -- Towards the cohesion of a life : chapter outline -- Problematizing the field of the self -- Between rigidification and dehiscence : context and counter-context -- Ancestry for the self in a problematic field -- Conceptual personae and the self -- Aporia of the inscrutability of the self -- Sweeney : philosophical bathyscope -- Critique on the kantian self -- Pretensions of the kantian self (...) -- Divided self still surrounded by the mad and the replicant -- The narrative self -- Oneself as another or onselves as myself -- The narrative self : origins in Kant -- Appearance and exposition of the narrative self -- Working through narrative -- Towards an interrogation of the narrative self -- Questioning the narrative self through its progenitors -- Methodology : questioning back -- The narrative self in retrospect -- The poetic composition of the self : threefold mimesis -- Summary : problems for narrative identity -- Transversals between Ricoeur and Deleuze -- In the land of the larval selves -- Origins in Schelling -- Ontology of productivity -- The dogmatic image of thought -- The narrative self as twin multiplicities -- Dissolving the narrative self -- From multiplicity to the narrative self -- Obscure stammering for a new narrative self -- Between time and the self : a fractured I -- Laws in the germplasm of narrative : the dark precursor -- Narrative persona -- From debt to excess -- Ricoeur's dilemma of the self : substance or illusion? -- Deleuze and Aristotle : a disavowed affinity -- Interzone -- Between dark precursor and narrative self : gelassenheit -- Inhering problems for the becoming-narrative self -- An unguessed axis for narrative selves -- From excess to debt : evolving constraints to narrative identity -- Where to start, three stations : natality, personhood, narrative selfhood -- First constraint : proustian love and lack -- Narrative constraints : implications for the synthesis of the heterogeneous -- The poetic imagination within the evolving constraints of narrative productivity -- Where Deleuze was, there Ricoeur shall be? -- The narrative self : a badly posed question -- Second constraint : imagination within structure and obligation -- A self entombed in a debt to the past. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis piece explores the dialogic form as a way to engage in rigorously focused philosophical analysis and the generation of problems. We take up Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the relation of aesthetics and politics, and his critique of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic thought in its purported inability to generate political community. To develop the stakes of this problem, we introduce Simone Weil’s concept of decreation as a possible bridge between the deformative capacity of aesthetics emphasized by Deleuze, and the (...) politically constitutive aesthetics demanded by Rancière. To see the efficacy of the relation between the concepts of deformation, decreation, and political community, we explore the history of the problem of figuration in art and the problem of collective constitution in politics. We conclude that a process of deformation and decreation is an essential feature of political becoming which does not preclude the development of community; undoing the self, to the contrary, activates wider possibilities for relating to the human and non-human world. (shrink)

In the paper we will study the notions of possible-worlds semantics, fiction, and creativity. The intention is to show how the notion of possible-worlds semantics allows us to generate a fresh interpretation of the notions of fiction and creativity. To do this, we have to consider the philosophy of logic. Possible-worlds semantics can be used in interpreting modal notions. The intention is to interpret the notions of fiction and creativity as modal notions. However, the analysis shows that (...) the notions of fiction and creativity are multimodal notions. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. (...) Deleuze was also well-known for a number of important monographs he published in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), as well as for his writings on the various arts, which include a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature. Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). (shrink)

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of ‘reasoning’ even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society by designing the child. These approaches to democracy make inequality into the premise of equality, assuming a consensual partition of the world and the need for specific agents to monitor partitioned boundaries, thus reinserting (...) differences as the basis of practice. Democracy, however, according to Jacques Rancière, only becomes visible when its partitioning is challenged under the opinion of equality. Yet, undoing the epistemological dogma of planning embodied in the notions of ‘critical’ and deliberative democracy might also involve confronting the comparative style of thought which provides the epistemological ‘rules’ that insert inequality as equality. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and Derrida's justice help extend Rancière's democracy and equality into unfamiliar terrain. What implications might this have for thinking about educational policy and curriculum? The argument, ironically, maintains Enlightenment attitudes about reason and rationality, but while ‘trying’ different epistemological rules and recognizing how the epistemological and ontological fold into one another it provides an alternative understanding of education and democracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to look at the way in which Deleuze's reading of Kant's transcendental dialectic influences some of the key thèmes of Différence and Répétition. As we shall see, in the transcendental dialectic, Kant takes the step of claiming that reason, in its natural functioning, is prone to misadventures. Whereas for Descartes, for instance, error takes place between two faculties, such as when reason (wrongly) infers that a stick in water is bent on the basis of sensé (...) impressions, Kant postulâtes that reason générâtes illusions internally purely in the course of its natural function. It is thèse illusions which lead reason into antinomy, as on the basis of thèse illusions, it is led to posit an illegitimate concept of the world as a totality. Further, for Kant, the antinomies represent an indirect proof of transcendental idealism, as it is only with the additional assumption of the noumenon, as that which falls outside of appearance, that we are able to résolve the antinomies. Deleuze's work on the image of thought clearly owes a great deal to Kant's theory of transcendental illusion, but the connections between Kant's transcendental dialectic and the structure of Différence and Répétition go deeper than this. Whereas Kant's problem is that reason générâtes contradictions when it assumes that the unconditioned can be given to reason, Deleuze's problem is the impossibility of developing a concept of différence within représentation. Between thèse two problems, there are significant structural parallels - in particular, the attempt to think outside the dichotomy of the finite and the infinité, and the attempt to prevent the application of spatio-temporal predicates to the noumenon. The antinomy of représentation for Deleuze is the inability of représentation to think différence apart from as purely representational or as undifferenciated abyss. As we shall see, Deleuze gives an explanation of this antinomy in terms of the differential calculus, and the notion of the differential in particular. While thèse parallels exist between Kant and Deleuze's thought, there are also some important différences. Although the differential is not determined in relation to représentation, this does not mean that it lacks ail détermination. This opens up a possibility not available in Kant's philosophy, that is, a thinking beyond the limit of représentation. As we shall see, Kant closes off this possibility by giving reason a heuristic function which in effect reinstates représentation. Kant makes this move precisely because the lack of spatiotemporal déterminations of the noumenal means for Kant that the noumenal lacks déterminations altogether. (shrink)

This book approaches work by Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou through their shared commitment to multiplicity, a novel approach to addressing one of the oldest philosophical questions: is being one or many? Becky Vartabedian examines major statements of multiplicity by Deleuze and Badiou to assess the structure of multiplicity as ontological ground or foundation, and the mathematical procedures these accounts prescribe for understanding one in relation to multiplicity. Written in a clear, engaging style, Vartabedian introduces readers (...) to Deleuze and Badiou's key ontological commitments, including the mathematical resources underpinning their accounts of multiplicity and one, and situates these as a conversation unfolding amid political and intellectual transformations. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Kant's theory of judgment-forms. It argues that it is not true in Kant's logic that assertoric or apodeictic judgments imply problematic ones, in the manner in which necessity and truth imply possibility in even the weakest systems of modern modal logic. The chapter then discusses theories of judgment-form after Kant, the theory of quantification, Frege's Begriffsschrift, C. I. Lewis and the beginnings of modern modal logic, the proof-theoretic approach to modal logic, possible (...) world semantics, correspondence theory, and modality and quantification. (shrink)

‘Creative Involution’ posits something of a philosophical genealogy, a line of flight that has neither need for nor interest in the periodisation of Modernism, a line of which Beckett (even reluctantly) is part. Murphy, among others, is deterritorialised as much as Beckett's landscapes are, and so he/they become a ‘complexification’ of being that manifests itself in Beckett not as represented, representative or a representation, since so much of Beckett deals with that which cannot be uttered, known or represented, but whose (...) image the works (and its figures) have become, a thinking through of negativity, becoming, and multiplicity through non-Newtonian motion, of being as becoming, where every movement brings something new into the world, but in something of a reverse Darwinism that moves from complex to simple organism, from Murphy to Worm, or Watt to Pim, or among the nameless figures in the short prose, a ‘becoming-animal’, in something not so much of a creative devolution but rather a ‘neoevolution’, or to adopt another term from Deleuze and Guattari, an ‘involution’, which ‘is in no way confused with regression’ (1987: 238), becomings creating nothing less than new worlds. Writing casually to his post-war confidant Georges Duthuit on 26 July 1951, Beckett noted in the midst of gardening chores, ‘Never seen so many butterflies in such worm-state, this little central cylinder, the only flesh, is the worm’ (2011: 271). The observation comes after the writing but before the premiere performance of Waiting for Godot in which Gogo tells Didi, ‘You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!’ (1954: 67). Such ‘becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity’ (1987: 239), Deleuze and Guattari tell us. For Beckett it defines creativity as well, only possible through such un-tethered selves or beings, amid the generation of varieties and differences, accessible through moments of deterritorialisation, characterised by, ‘A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings’ (240). (shrink)

Simondon and Deleuze are the philosophers of intensity: thinking the intensity of being rather than its formal a priori is for them the path to the “true transcendental.” The true transcendental, according to these two post-Kantian philosophers, would be the conditions of real experience, which are not dictated by a reason anticipating the relation to phenomena, but by individuation. This reversal priviledges the process of openness to difference as a production of the unexpected for knowledge. To be individuated, for Simondon (...) as for Deleuze, is to learn to overcome a certain logic of representation, based on the principle of identity, by giving precedence to singularities: the individual is not only a thinking substance cutting up the world according to its categories, but also an active nature facing the unknown. But one might ask how the individual can be identified and develop if it is constituted, at its expense, from intensive relations and experiences that it cannot synthesize in the understanding. Does individuation ultimately make sense? Simondon and Deleuze agree that consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification: this possibility for consciousness of unifi ng the diversity of experience, of maintaining a unity in plurality, refers to the preindividual, which defines in Simondon a field of ontological freedom, that is, of multiple individuations enriching the Self. For Deleuze, in his careful reading of Simondon, it is the place of the emission of singularities in the process of intensive individuation. In both cases, it is a question of defining a new form of subjectivity, closer to the realities of experience, of what we might call the transductive forms of sensibility. (shrink)

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities presents a wide array of possible cities—cities whose composition turns on a productive ambiguity of their being described or invented by Marco Polo in his conversations with Kublai Khan. Implicit in this book is also a theory about how all possible cities are composed. The method turns on decomposing a city down to its basic elements and recomposing it in different ways through the imagination. I argue that there is a close affinity between Calvino’s (...) theory of fictional cities and Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds. The main similarity is that both theo­ries are combinatorial—they suppose that possibilities are produced by combination and variation of basic elements. The paper presents Leibniz’s theory of possibility in its metaphysical context and explores the similarity with Calvino’s cities in their literary context. I suggest that there is a rather strong relation between the theory of literary fiction implicit in Invisible Cities and Leibniz’s theory of possibility, in that both define the possible in terms of the conceivable. Indeed, Leibniz often refers to literary examples to substantiate his position, and I argue that this reveals an essential feature of his theory. (shrink)

Badiou explores the exponentially rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published her for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althussers's canonical works For Marks and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of 'potato fascism' in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari's A Thousand Plateus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara (...) Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, the argues for the persistence of Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea. (shrink)

Accounts of modality in terms of fictional possible worlds face an objection based on the idea that when modal claims are analysed in terms of fictions, the connection between analysans and analysandum seems artificial. Strong modal fictionalism, the theory according to which modal claims are analysed in terms of a fiction, has been defended by, among others, Seahwa Kim, who has recently claimed that the philosophical objection that the connection between modality and fictions is artificial can be met. I (...) propose a new way of spelling out the intuition of artificiality and show that strong modal fictionalism should be rejected. (shrink)

Like nuclear energy, most technologies could have dual use—for health and well being and disaster and terror. Some research publications have brought to the forefront the tragic consequences of the latter potential through their possible use. Monitoring life science research and development (R&D) to prevent possible misuse is a challenging task globally, more so in developing economies like India, which are emerging as major biotech hubs. As a signatory to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, India has put (...) in motion a process of evolving a series of measures to manage dual-use technology. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has taken a lead in drafting model codes of conduct, ethics and practice for use by other S&T agencies to tailor them as per their requirements. Taking cue from the discussions held by the editors of the various medical and science journals in the developed world, the Indian Journal of Medical Research, the official publication of the ICMR, is working on policy and uniform practice of publication of dual-use research results. The Government of India too has promulgated legal provisions to minimize the risks of misuse of technology, like the Weapons of Mass Destruction Act. Clearly, no single agency would be able to manage the dual-use of technology effectively. Multiple agencies have to come together to work in tandem for effective implementation of various measure and also like Janus, ensure that they are neither too restrictive nor intrusive to discourage the development of science. (shrink)

This paper reads Deleuze through a Spinozist lens to conceive of the human being as a dynamic and complex whole in constant interchange with its environment. The author thus moves beyond philosophical dualisms, and challenges the assumption that a hierarchical normative organization is the only possible world. Using the example of rape, she argues that micropolitical strategies might disrupt and “pass” the juridical order and open up alternative, more equitable, forms of sociability.

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou's _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ cast Gilles Deleuze as a secret philosopher of the One. In this work, Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze's position within contemporary political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker's major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology. Through close readings of Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_, _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (with Felix Guattari), and _Cinema 2_, Crockett argues that Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic (...) intellectual Badiou had portrayed. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze's radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. He also refutes the notion Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life. Using Badiou's critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze's work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations. (shrink)

In this essay I attempt to defend Badiou's conception of inaesthetics, drawn from the Handbook of Inaesthetics, from the pertinent criticisms of Rancière. In doing so, it is possible to delimit the intra-philosophical effects (truth effects) of artistic events (this combination being the domain of inaesthetics). Badiou can be defended from all of Rancière's objections, save the objection that inaesthetics asserts a 'propriety of art.' However, in granting this objection, it is possible to open a different (...) question regarding Badiou's work: what is the status of Badiou's comments on art outside of the Handbook of Inaesthetics? Through a reading of Le siècle, I show that, for Badiou, the importance of art extends beyond inaesthetics to other domains of thought. Yet Badiou has yet to answer the question of how art and truth relate outside of the domain of inaesthetics. (shrink)

This essay investigates thought as an event of “multiplicity.” French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou pose this as a concept of change (political and otherwise). Both philosophers propose that multiplicity means thinking happens as an event by engaging a theoretical impasse, or “un-thought.” Un-thought opens up and changes ideas into complex varieties or multiplicities. This dynamic is examined through the example of May ‘68, an actual event that gives context to how multiplicity expresses “radical change.” The (...) aim of this article is to see how both thinkers’ theories overlap. For Badiou, multiplicities are “truths” that happen whilst making a decision, engaging a notion of “point.” For Deleuze, multiplicities are concepts that happen materially in life as metaphysical forces, or “lines.” Multiplicity is critically approached as a complex variety of ideas that change in the forms of art, politics, and science. (shrink)

Can transcendental empiricism be the mainstay to devise a poetics of the modern novel? Deleuze synthesizes it into a formula borrowed from Butor: “telling multiple stories simultaneously”. This process, closely related to experimentation in the plastic arts, is based on a new transcendental imagination, which finds what concerns it specifically in the notion of disparation, drawn from Simondon. Cosmos is its emblematic novel. The construction of the Platonic simulacrum already embedded such disparity. But instead of showing several perspectives, the literary (...) simulacrum narrates them, in the form of series, following the structuralist model. They coexist without any of them being privileged, but are nonetheless perspectives on absolutely divergent worlds. In contrast to Finnegans Wake, a simulacrum that complicates all the stories of the world, Borges' Fictions rely on chance so that one and the same story can tell an infinity of outcomes. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s 1983–1984 lecture series on “the One” is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no “One”: there is no fundamental unit of being; being is inherently multiple. What is novel in Badiou’s view of multiplicity is his reliance on mathematics, and set theory in (...) particular. A set is a collection of things—yet, as he observes, it often is taken to “count as one” operationally for the purposes of mathematical transformations. In this seminar, distinguishing between “the One” and “counting as one” emerges as essential to Badiou’s ontological project. His analysis of reflections on oneness in Descartes, Plato, and Kant prefigures core arguments of his defining work, Being and Event. Showcasing the seeds of Badiou’s key ideas and later thought, The One features singular readings, breathtaking theorizations, and frequently astonishing offhand remarks. (shrink)

This article surveys some contemporary literature in analytic philosophy of religion bearing on the relationship between God and possible worlds. Most of these authors take “God” to denote an essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, who is the creator and sustainer of all that contingently exists. Since the 1960s, philosophers have employed the conceptual apparatus of worlds to discuss topics pertaining to God. Very roughly, the actual world is the way things are, whereas each possible world is (...) a way things might have been. Many philosophers believe that if God exists, he could not have failed to exist. In other words, God exists in all possible worlds; God is a necessary being. The first section of this article, God and Necessity, discusses several accounts of what this means, and of the relationship between God and worlds. Worlds are widely assumed to bear axiological properties: some are good, others are bad; some are better, others are worse. Some authors have judged that God could not exist in bad worlds. Whether this counts against theism is discussed under God and Bad Worlds (The Modal Problem of Evil). If all worlds bear axiological properties, and can be compared, it is natural to wonder whether the hierarchy has an upper bound. The literature concerning this topic is surveyed under Is there a Best Possible World?. It is widely assumed that if God exists, he chooses a world to make actual. The next three sections of this article consider this choice: God’s Choice if there is One Best Possible World, God’s Choice if there are Multiple Best Worlds, and God’s Choice if there are No Best Worlds. Some authors hold that certain pairs of worlds simply cannot be compared. The literature surrounding God’s choice between such pairs is discussed under God’s Choice and Incomparable Worlds. Some philosophers have recently argued that if theism is true, the actual world is a multiverse made up of many worthy universes. Their proposals are discussed under God and the Multiverse. Finally, this article surveys some literature that attempts to answer the following question, with respect to the value of worlds: What Difference Would—or Does—God’s Existence Make? Given space constraints, this article does not discuss arguments for God’s existence that invoke possible worlds, such as “ontological” arguments. Nor does it discuss arguments for atheism that appeal to evil, except insofar as theistic multiverse theories constitute responses. (shrink)

The thesis that entities exist in, at, or in relation to logically possible worlds is criticized. The suggestion that actually nonexistent fictional characters might nevertheless exist in nonactual merely logically possible worlds runs afoul of the most general transworld identity requirements. An influential philosophical argument for the concept of world-relativized existence is examined in Alvin Plantinga’s formal development and explanation of modal semantic relations. Despite proposing an attractive unified semantics of alethic modality, Plantinga’s argument is rejected on formal (...) grounds as supporting materially false actual existence assertions in the case of actually nonexistent objects in the framework of Plantinga’s own underlying classical predicate-quantificational logic. (shrink)

This article addresses the ontological presuppositions of the discourse on world politics in political and international relations theory. We argue that the ambivalent status of world politics is due to the understanding of its central concept, that is, the world, in terms of totality or ‘the whole’. Drawing on Alain Badiou's set-theoretical ontology, this article demonstrates that such a concept is logically inconsistent, which leads the discourse on world politics to a perpetual oscillation between the presupposition of a universal totality (...) and the unmasking of its impossibility. We then proceed to the particularistic concept of the world as a limited totality with no pretense to universality, as developed in Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and Badiou's objective phenomenology. Although this approach affirming the existence of the infinity of infinite worlds appears of little use to the universalist problematic of world politics, it provides us with a pathway to the third concept of the world as the void, in which a plurality of positive worlds coexist and which is their ontological condition of possibility. We argue that only this concept of the world enables a logically consistent notion of universality as non-totalizable and immediate. The final section addresses the implications of this concept for rethinking world politics as a practice of transformation of particular worlds in accordance with the universal principles derived from the disclosure of the world as void. (shrink)

This concise and accessible book is the perfect introduction to Badiou’s thought. Responding to Tarby’s questions, Badiou takes us on a journey that interrogates and explores the four conditions of philosophy: politics, love, art and science. In all these domains, events occur that bring to light possibilities that were invisible or even unthinkable; they propose something to us. Everything then depends on how the possibility opened up by the event is grasped, elaborated and embedded in the world – this is (...) what Badiou calls a ‘truth procedure’. The event creates a possibility but there then has to be an effort – a group effort in the case of politics, an individual effort in the case of love or art – for this possibility to become real and inscribed in the world. As he explains his thinking on politics, love, art and science, Badiou takes stock of his major works, reflects on their central themes and arguments and looks forward to the questions he plans to address in his future writings. The book concludes with a short introduction to Badiou’s philosophy by Fabien Tarby. For anyone wishing to understand the work of one of the most widely read and influential philosophers writing today, this small book will be an indispensable guide. (shrink)

The article examines the transformations of the philosophical concept of world as it appears in the cosmopolitan tradition of political thought and its relation to the problem of the border. It focuses particularly on how world is understood as either lost or multiplied in the contexts of modernity, globalisation, and migration. The article discusses postcolonial conceptions of cosmopolitics and the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt to show how the universal ideal of the world is replaced by singular constructions of worlds (...) in terms of the experience of migrants and refugees or the phenomenological horizon of political action. I conclude by suggesting that Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as a conflict of worlds can take us beyond the traps of both cosmopolitan universalism and the phenomenological singularity of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Fictionalism about possible worlds is the view that talk about worlds in the analysis of modality is to be construed as ontologically innocent discourse about the content of a fiction. Versions of the view have been defended by D M Armstrong (in "A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility") and by myself (in "Modal Fictionalism', "Mind" 99, July 1990). The present note argues that fictionalist accounts of modality (both Armstrong's version and my own) fail to serve the fictionalists ontological purposes because (...) they imply that as a matter of necessity there exist many worlds. (shrink)

The works of Gilles Deleuze -- on cinema, literature, painting, and philosophy -- have made him one of the most widely read thinkers of his generation. This compact critical volume is not only a powerful reappraisal of Deleuze's thought, but also the first major work by Alain Badiou available in English. Badiou compellingly redefines "Deleuzian, " throwing down the gauntlet in the battle over the very meaning of Deleuze's legacy. For those who view Deleuze as the apostle of desire, flu, (...) and multiplicity, Badiou's book is a deliberate provocation. Through a deep philosophical engagement with his writings, Badiou contends that Deleuze is not the Dionysian thinker of becoming he took himself to be; on the contrary, he is an ascetic philosopher of Being and Oneness. Deleuze's self-declared anti-Platonism fails -- and that, in Badiou's view, may ultimately be to his credit. "Perhaps it is not Platonism that has to be overturned, " Badiou writes, "but the anti-Platonism taken as evident throughout this entire century." This volume draws on a five-year correspondence undertaken by Badiou and Deleuze near the end of Deleuze's life, when the two put aside long-standing political and philosophical differences to exchange ideas about similar problems in their work. Badiou's incomparably attentive readings of key Deleuzian concepts radically revise reigning interpretations, offering new insights to even the veteran Deleuze reader and serving as an entree to the controversial notion of a "restoration" of Plato advocated by Badiou -- in his own right one of the most original figures in postwar French philosophy. The result is a critical tour de force that repositions Deleuze, one of the mostimportant thinkers of our time, and introduces Badiou to English-speaking readers. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed was the first book on cinema to attempt to provide an ontological theorisation of film that could account not only for its popular instances and the reason why they enthralled audiences for over half a century but also for the demise of its mythic function and the possibility of its redemption in serious modernist film. Inadequately understood at the time of its publication, and for too long ignored by Film Studies, Cavell's arguments about modernist cinema (...) all but disappeared in the wake of the rise of postmodern theory. Yet the crisis of belief that confronted modern arts, condemned them to the production of serious works, and eventually unsettled the privileged place of mainstream cinema in twentieth century liberal democracies, still laps at our feet. This essay follows on the back of Kathleen Kelley's recent essay on Cavell, Greenberg, Bazin and medium specificity in film and Robert Sinnerbrink's work aligning Cavell’s understanding of cinema as 'a moving image of skepticism' with the project of thinking philosophically about film. It aims to continue to unpack the idea of automatism as it is conceived by Cavell to operate in film and to argue, along with Kelley and Sinnerbrink, for its importance for understanding the conviction of serious films. (shrink)

Is self-consciousness a condition of possibility for knowledge? Does Kant s theory of self-consciousness commit us to transcendental idealism? How convincing is Kant s theory of self-consciousness? How should we understand transcendental idealism? What is Hegel s alternative? How do Kant and Hegel conceive of the beautiful? How do their conceptions of beauty relate to their metaphysics? In this volume, some of the world s most renowned Kant and Hegel scholars seek to provide answers.".

The aim of this article is to give an example of how an exercise in post-critical educational research might be conceptualized. The example refers to an enquiry into building a public sphere around education in Poland. First, a post-critical approach in educational research is defined with reference to the two dominant perspectives of social research, namely the (neo)positivistic and the critical paradigm. Next, and following insights of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, the idea of building is presented in terms (...) of the persistent introduction of a new beginning into a social reality through acting in line with an assumption (an axiom) that, from the point of view of critical knowledge about the current status quo, seems fictional (or impossible). Such a persistent verification of an impossible axiom aims at establishing a sphere of exception from the dominant social order, offering—through the ideas of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben—a nondialectical logic of social transformation. Finally, in conclusion the article focuses on the phenomenon of condensation as one of the key results of the exemplary research project analysed throughout the text. This points to the kind of knowledge that post-critical research projects are able to bring about. (shrink)

English-speaking readers might be surprised to learn that Alain Badiou writes fiction and plays along with his philosophical works and that they are just as important to understanding his larger intellectual project. In _Ahmed the Philosopher_, Badiou's most entertaining and accessible play, translated into English here for the first time, readers are introduced to Badiou's philosophy through a theatrical tour de force that has met with much success in France. _Ahmed the Philosoph_er presents its comic hero, the "treacherous servant" Ahmed, (...) as a seductively trenchant philosopher even as it casts philosophy itself as a comic performance. The comedy unfolds as a series of lessons, with each "short play" or sketch illuminating a different Badiousian concept. Yet Ahmed does more than illustrate philosophical abstractions; he embodies and vivifies the theatrical and performative aspects of philosophy, mobilizing a comic energy that exposes the emptiness and pomp of the world. Through his example, the audience is moved to a living engagement with philosophy, discovering in it the power to break through the limits of everyday life. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray’s writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one’s self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and (...) Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray’s thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, he (...) introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

Étienne Souriau was a refined and demanding thinker, with an aristocratic demeanour, far removed from the currents of ideas dominant in his time. A difficult and erudite author, out of tune with the times he lived in, he would seem the least likely candidate to appeal to a hurried and globalised public like that of the twenty-first century. A sophisticated representative of a rationalist positivism, no stranger to the Husserlian canon and not even insensitive to the motivations dear to the (...) gnoseological debate of Cartesian and Kantian matrix (as well as to the major themes of classical metaphysics), Souriau pursues the ideal of a constructive philosophy, capable of understanding – and at the same time favouring – the advancement of the creative process conceived as a set of poetic acts and progressive dynamic operations. In his texts, Souriau is attentive to grasping the correspondences, exchanges and reciprocal transitions between one mode of existence and another, as well as the resonances between the various art forms in the different fields of knowledge, testing an original method that is epistemologically very fruitful. The aim of this monographic issue of Aisthesis dedicated to Étienne Souriau is to explore his thought in its multiple aspects, in order to measure its topicality in relation to the themes and problems that characterise contemporary philosophical debate, with particular reference to aesthetics and ontology as well as to the dense network of connections between the two fields. One of the most interesting characteristics of Souriau’s thought that has stood the test of time would appear to be its multifacetedness: the quality of lending itself to being applied even to spheres that are apparently very distant from reflection on art, such as cultural anthropology, political philosophy or morality. It seemed to us that it largely owes its relevance precisely to the intersections between one field of knowledge and another. The issue contains twelve contributions on Souriau that explore his main aspects in depth. They range from analyses devoted to the architecture of Souriau’s thought (his general philosophy) in the essays by Dominique Chateau and Filippo Domenicali, which can furnish a useful overall picture of the man, to essays that attempt to focus on the more properly ontological core of this thought, such as those devoted to the arabesque motif (Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli), the theory of the soul (Sjoerd Van Tuinen) or the multiplicity of worlds (Noëlie Plé). Interspersed between these are contributions that focus more on the comparison between Étienne Souriau’s thought and the philosophers of his time, such as Dufrenne (Maryvonne Saison), or with well-known later philosophers who explicitly referred to him, prolonging his creative impetus, such as Gilles Deleuze (Casey Boyle) and Bruno Latour (Aline Wiame), the true architect of the current Souriau “comeback”. Finally, in addition to essays of a more theoretical nature, there are contributions that attempt to re-evaluate certain aspects of Souriau’s aesthetics, such as the fruitfulness of the cues that can come from his thought for the debate on animal aesthetics (Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and Andrea Scanziani), or the possible topicality of his theory of forms (Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarie). In the “Miscellaneous” section, this issue hosts a number of studies that aim to explore the aesthetic implications of new technologies, the themes of ecological aesthetics, as well as to offer an unusual profile of Baumgarten. (shrink)

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, a number of radical left political theorists focused their philosophical attention on the relevance of ancient atomism, revitalizing a tradition that went back to Karl Marx's work on his dissertation. This essay looks at the uses of atomism by two thinkers in particular, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, in order to see how their discussions of and references to ancient materialism help to shed light on their fundamental disagreements about the nature of (...) community and equality. First, this paper argues that what Badiou and Rancière most obviously share in their assessments of atomism is a negative judgment regarding the post-swerve constitution of the world, while what most obviously distinguishes their positions is their differing judgments regarding the preswerve rain of the atoms in the void. Becoming clear both about how Badiou and Rancière respond to what comes before and after the atomistic swerve helps to clarify an implicit response on Rancière’s part to what has become Badiou’s chief objection to Rancière’s political theory. Second, this paper argues that the fact that Badiou assesses both what comes before and what comes after the swerve as negative, while Rancière assesses only what comes after the swerve as negative, makes clear that their most essential point of difference concerns the status of the swerve that mediates between before and after. Working through the complexities of Badiou’s analysis of the swerve and uncovering Rancière’s extremely subtle analysis of the swerve helps to clarify a major aspect of what has become Rancière’s chief criticism of Badiou’s conception of philosophy. (shrink)

Modal realism -- Time, space, world -- Existence -- Actuality -- Modal realism and modal tense -- Transworld individuals and their identity -- Existensionalism -- Impossibility -- Proposition and relief -- Fictional worlds -- Epistemology.

Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou is an anthology of writings on cinema and film by many of the major thinkers in continental philosophy. The book presents a selection of fundamental texts, each accompanied by an introduction and exposition by the editor, Christopher Kul-Want, that places the philosophers within a historical and intellectual framework of aesthetic and social thought. Encompassing a range of intellectual traditions--Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, gender and affect theories--this critical reader features writings by Bergson, Benjamin, Adorno (...) and Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Agamben, Žižek, Nancy, Cavell, Rancière, Badiou, Stiegler, and Silverman. Many texts discuss cinema as a mass medium; others develop phenomenological analyses of film itself. They reflect upon the potential of film to challenge dominant forms of ideology. The anthology considers the ways in which cinema can disrupt the clichés of capitalist images and offer radical possibilities for creating new worlds of visceral experience outside the grasp of habitual forms of knowledge and subjectivity. Ranging from the early silent period of cinema through the classics of European and Hollywood cinema to the early twenty-first century, the films discussed offer a vivid sense of these philosophers' concepts and ideas, casting new light on the history of cinema. This reader is an essential and valuable resource for a wide range of courses in film and philosophy. (shrink)

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's (...) analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies). (shrink)

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without 'relations of explication' and any kind of (...) pre-understanding (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical 'going beyond' the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations. (shrink)