Badiou in Jamaica

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Author :
Publisher : Re.Press
ISBN 13 : 9780987268266
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis Badiou in Jamaica by : Colin Wright

Download or read book Badiou in Jamaica written by Colin Wright and published by Re.Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book foregrounds the centrality of political conflicts in the radical philosophy of Alain Badiou. It is divided into two halves. The first undertakes a reading of Badiou¿s wider oeuvre (beyond Being and Event) and demonstrates that his political theory derives from analyses of key revolutionary sequences such as the Paris Commune, October `17, May `68 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From his evolving meditations on these sequences, and from his theoretical borrowings from Marxism, psychoanalysis and set-theory, Badiou has established a complex schema of the possible outcomes of conflict which constitutes a subtle and flexible theory of change. In the second half, the book applies this schema to a concrete `situation¿: colonial and post-colonial Jamaica. Against the backdrop of the history of conflict in Jamaica, the Morant Bay Revolt of 1865 is interpreted as an `event¿ in Badiou¿s very precise sense. The Rastafari movement is then posited as a `subject body¿ faithful to this event, while roots reggae is explored as the `subject language¿ of this Rastafarian subject body. Through this example, it is suggested that the starkness of the account of the event in Being and Event, in its incompatibility with history or culture, must be qualified if Badiou¿s contribution to a renewed philosophy of conflict is to be realized. To this end, the book builds on Badiou¿s own Logics of Worlds in order to speculatively propose two new concepts: `evental historiography¿ and `evental culture¿. It is argued that conceptual elaborations like these might enable a productive rapprochement between Badiou and Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory ¿ disciplines of which Badiou himself has been extremely critical, but which are certain to shape his reception in the English-speaking world. Conversely, both Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory, precisely in their increasingly enfeebled conceptions of social, cultural and political conflict, stand to gain a great deal from dialogue with the persistently Maoist dimensions of Badiou¿s work.

The New Materialism

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131760587X
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Materialism by : Geoff Pfeifer

Download or read book The New Materialism written by Geoff Pfeifer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser’s materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou’s and Žižek’s work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek’s materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou’s does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer’s book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.

The Incident at Antioch / L’Incident d’Antioche

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023152773X
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis The Incident at Antioch / L’Incident d’Antioche by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book The Incident at Antioch / L’Incident d’Antioche written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou's transition from classical Marxism to a "politics of subtraction" far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics. This bilingual edition presents L'Incident d'Antioche in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel's The City, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer's extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou's intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play's settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off.

Deleuze Beyond Badiou

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231530919
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Deleuze Beyond Badiou by : Clayton Crockett

Download or read book Deleuze Beyond Badiou written by Clayton Crockett and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Ahmed the Philosopher

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231536585
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Ahmed the Philosopher by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Ahmed the Philosopher written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Philosopher 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.

Democracy in What State?

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023115299X
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Democracy in What State? by : Giorgio Agamben

Download or read book Democracy in What State? written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

Plato's Republic

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745663516
Total Pages : 565 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (456 download)

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Book Synopsis Plato's Republic by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Plato's Republic written by Alain Badiou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Republic is one of the most well-known and widely discussed texts in the history of philosophy, but how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2500 years after it was originally composed? Alain Badiou invents a new genre in order to breathe fresh life into Plato's text and restore its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has retranslated the work from the original Greek and, by making various changes, adapted it for our times. In this innovative reimagining of a classic text, Badiou has removed all references specific to ancient Greek society, from the endless exchanges about the moral courage of poets to those political considerations that were only of interest to the aristocratic elite. On the other hand, Badiou has expanded the range of cultural references: here philosophy is firing on all cylinders, and Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud and Hegel. They demonstrate the enduring nature of true philosophy, always ready to move with the times. Moreover, Badiou the dramatist has made the Socratic dialogue a true oratorial contest: in his version of the Republic, the interlocutors have more in mind than merely agreeing with the Master. They stand up to him, put him on the spot and thereby show thought in motion. Through this work of writing, scholarship and philosophy, we are able, for the first time, to read a version of Plato's text which is alive, stimulating and directly relevant to our world today.

Resistance and the Politics of Truth

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Publisher : transcript Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3732839079
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (328 download)

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Book Synopsis Resistance and the Politics of Truth by : Iain MacKenzie

Download or read book Resistance and the Politics of Truth written by Iain MacKenzie and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-03-31 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `The truth will set you free' is a maxim central to both theories and practices of resistance. Nonetheless, it is a claim that has come under fire from an array of critical perspectives in the second half of the 20th century. Iain MacKenzie analyses two of the most compelling of these perspectives: the poststructuralist politics of truth formulated by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the alternative post-foundational account of truth and militancy developed by Alain Badiou. He argues that a critically oriented version of poststructuralism provides both an understanding of the deeply entwined nature of truth and power and a compelling account of the creative practices that may sustain resistance.

Lacan

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548419
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Lacan by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Lacan written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231544421
Total Pages : 143 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality. In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.

What Does a Jew Want?

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231527373
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis What Does a Jew Want? by : Udi Aloni

Download or read book What Does a Jew Want? written by Udi Aloni and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the hopes of promoting justice, peace, and solidarity for and with the Palestinian people, Udi Aloni joins with Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler to confront the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their bold question: Will a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians dare to walk together toward a joint Israel-Palestine? Through a collage of meditation, interview, diary, and essay, Aloni and his interlocutors present a personal, intellectual, and altogether provocative account rich with the insights of philosophy and critical theory. They ultimately foresee the emergence of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state, incorporating the work of Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and Jewish theology to recast the conflict in secular theological terms.

Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231545371
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Cinema/Politics/Philosophy by : Nico Baumbach

Download or read book Cinema/Politics/Philosophy written by Nico Baumbach and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.

Malebranche

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548532
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Malebranche by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Malebranche written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou is perhaps the world’s most significant living philosopher. In his annual seminars on major topics and pivotal figures, Badiou developed vital aspects of his thinking on a range of subjects that he would go on to explore in his influential works. In this seminar, Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou’s thought at a key moment in the years before the publication of his most important work, Being and Event, and a lively interrogation of Malebranche’s key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace. Badiou develops a rigorous yet novel analysis of Malebranche’s theory of grace, retracing his claims regarding the nature of creation and the relation between God and world and between God and Jesus. Through Malebranche, Badiou develops a radical concept of truth and the subject. This book renders a seemingly obscure post-Cartesian philosopher fascinating and alive, restoring him to the philosophical canon. It occupies a pivotal place in Badiou’s reflections on the nature of being that demonstrates the crucial role of theology in his thinking.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350184160
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis by : Jeremy Tambling

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis written by Jeremy Tambling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature's influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

Jacques Lacan, Past and Present

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231165110
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Jacques Lacan, Past and Present by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Jacques Lacan, Past and Present written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prompted by the thirtieth anniversary of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan’s death, this exchange between two prominent intellectuals is rich with surprising insights. Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical “masters,” Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Élisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou’s experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan’s death—critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan’s work, among other issues. Their dynamic dialogue draws readers into an intimate, at times contentious, yet ultimately productive debate that reinvigorates the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker.

Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231549369
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou by : Christopher Kul-Want

Download or read book Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou written by Christopher Kul-Want and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 of the texts discuss cinema as a mass medium; others develop phenomenological analyses of particular films. Reflecting upon the potential of films to challenge dominant forms of ideology, the anthology considers the ways in which they 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.

What Is a People?

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231541716
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis What Is a People? by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book What Is a People? written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.