On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
07.03.2012
Macherey's Spinoza
Ontology of multiplicity or materialist dialectic?
08.02.2012
Althusser's concept of immanent causality
Marx with Spinoza
08.12.2011
Exhausting politics
Being out of class (Deleuze)
01.11.2011
What is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating one's own potentiality to act?
The messianic class (Agamben)
29.06.2011
Sharing the inappropriatable
The retreating class (Nancy)
26.05.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class II (Badiou)
07.04.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class (Badiou)
03.03.2011
Disrupting the logic of division
The supplementary class (Rancière)
04.02.2011
The antinomies of proletarian politics
The paradoxical class (Balibar)
02.12.2010
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on political difference
Retreating the political
08.11.2010
Lars T. Lih as Reader of Lenin
What Is to be Done? and Bolshevism
03.10.2010
The concept of capitalism in "Anti-Oedipus"
Capitalism deterritorialized
30.06.2010
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan
An impossible encounter I
28.05.2010
An impossible encounter: Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan
Preparatory Meeting
27.05.2010
Micropolitics in "A thousand plateaus"
Molecular Politics I
07.04.2010
On affectivity and potentiality
Spinoza with Deleuze
04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive
04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming
04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality
08.10.2009
Reading Althusser
07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser
06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?
03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo
02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political
17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention
20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation
09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess
11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence
11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting
11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting
07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II
06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside
06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting
05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics
04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory
11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities
01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille
06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons
05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction
09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified
07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect
04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II
03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?
07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor
08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II
07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker
07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state
09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself
04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics
07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II
06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class
02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III
01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II
30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism
30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II
29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience
06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II
05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law
09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II
08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception
09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II
08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality
Alain Badiou
— (1982) Theory of the subject, London and New York: Continuum, 2009, pp. 37-50, 113-115, 132-139
For an introduction to the concepts used in the first part of Theory of the Subject, in particular scission, space of placement, force, contradiction, see glossary written by Bruno Bosteels and pp. 3-12
— (1985) Can politics be thought?, Durham and London: Duke University Press, forthcoming, Part One: Destruction, draft, pp. 1-3, 9-18
— (2005) The century, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, pp. 48-67
In two lectures delivered in January 1983 and June 1984 at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique at Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's invitation, Badiou held that the destruction of Marxism is inextricably bound to a heterodox Marxist recommencement. Against the anti-political dogma of the new philosophers, he claims that „all that we have left in truth is only the uninhabitable place of a Marxist heterodoxy to come“.
Taking up the Heideggerian figure of the Verwindung of metaphysics, Badiou attempts—at the ruined site of Marxism itself—to take a step forward in thinking politics and to affirm the foundational political hypothesis of Marxism: there is the real of workers’ insurrection.
The minimum of what Badiou wants to reinforce in Marxism is the hypothesis that a universal political capacity exists to affirm an event which has cut a hole in the fiction of imaginary existence. This capacity is defined by the force to isolate and implement the principles immanent to an event of insurrection and, hence, to stop the inegalitarian hubris by thinking and prescribing justice and equality in the course of a process that starts from the concrete situation.
With this idea of a political capacity to insurrect, of a hysterical, mobile and unbound proletarian force, Badiou announces to continue two concepts of politics in the young Marx, the concept of declassifying class and of generic being put forward in the Parisian Manuscripts, the introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the Communist Manifesto. The proletarian man without properties who possesses nothing but the capacity to subtract from the hegemonic status of the situation is the zero point of Badiou’s minimal Marxism.
At the forthcoming meeting, we will discuss the concept of scission in Badiou’s materialist dialectics, his theoretical progression from the notion of destruction to the notion of subtraction, his concept of declassifying class, and the reducing of politics to the capacity to subtract.