Alain Badiou: The Century (2005–)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, cinema, fascism, france, history, ideology, nazism, nihilism, philosophy, politics, reality, religion, united states, violence
“Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.
It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou’s proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century – not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.”
First published as Le Siècle, 2005.
Translated, with a Commentary and Notes by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Polity, 2007
ISBN 0745636314, 9780745636313
233 pages
PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)
Comment (0)Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)
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Graham Harman: Guerrilla Metaphysics. Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · metaphysics, perception, phenomenology, philosophy, things
Too unorthodox to be conservative, too systematic to be postmodern, Guerrilla Metaphysics is a unique attempt to describe the carpentry of things. At once systematic and offbeat, technical and poetic, it is a startling new vision of phenomenology’s motto: To the things themselves!
Instead of the occasional cause that makes God responsible for all events, Guerrilla Metaphysics seeks the vicarious cause that links human beings, tools, rivers, mountains, plastic, and clowns. Professor Harman argues for a radical shift in the phenomenological attitude to objects, and explains how phenomenology can be reunified with the physical world that it wanted to bracket from view.
In Part Two Harman takes a fresh approach to metaphor and comedy, showing how even physical causation has the structure of allure. In the final Part, he offers a new account of causation, which is shown to be not only vicarious but also asymmetrical and buffered.
Publisher Open Court, 2005
ISBN 0812694562, 9780812694567
Length 283 pages