Polity | Amazon
Upcoming in July, 2010
Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou’s first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the “end” of philosophy. In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: “one more step”.
The situation has considerably changed since then. Philosophy was threatened with obliteration at the time, whereas today it finds itself under threat for the diametrically opposed reason: it is endowed with an excessive, artificial existence. “Philosophy” is everywhere. It serves as a trademark for various media pundits. It livens up cafés and health clubs. It has its magazines and its gurus. It is universally called upon, by everything from banks to major state commissions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. In essence, “philosophy” has now come to stand for nothing other than its most ancient enemy: conservative ethics.
Badiou’s second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those “philosophies” that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of “the human” and its “rights”. There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival.
Product Details
Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Polity (July 7 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745648614
ISBN-13: 978-0745648613
See also:
Alain Badiou – Manifesto for Philosophy
U. of Minnesota Press | Amazon | Download
Some two hundred years after the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a polemically written philosophical essay of nearly 1,000 pages, disrespectfully entitled Critique of Cynical Reason, captured the imagination and the passions of readers in Germany. Contrary to Kant’s philosophical treatise, which, over a hundred years after its appearance, still made Musil’s Tor-less sweat with fear and nausea, Peter Sloterdijk’s treatise became an immediate success offering German intellectuals a master lesson in the pleasures of the text. Within only a few months over 40,000 copies had been sold, and the liberal feuilletons outdid each other in heaping praise on the author by comparing him to Nietzsche, Spengler, Schopenhauer. Since much of this praise focused on Sloterdijk’s critique of the Enlightenment, popular in West Germany since the conservative Tendenzwende of the 1970s, the Left responded by trying to relegate Sloterdijk’s essay to the dustbin of history, as a rotten ware of late capitalist decline…
Polity | Amazon | Download
Two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world?
Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all – as Badiou shows with his theory of universality.
Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess.
At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.
Editions Lignes | Amazon
L’Idée du communisme réunit les textes prononcés au colloque « On The Idea of Communism », organisé à l’initiative d’Alain Badiou et de Slavoj Zizek à Londres, en mars 2009. Avec les interventions des philosophes : Alain Badiou, Judith Balso, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Minqi Li, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière, Alessandro Russo, Roberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, Slavoj Zizek.
Voir aussi:
Slavoj Žižek, André Glucksmann, Guy Sorman & Cynthia Fleury – Ce Soir
Slavoj Žižek – Les matins de France Culture
Slavoj Žižek – Puissances du Communisme
Bernard-Henri Lévy et Slavoj Žižek: le débat
Verso | Amazon
Upcoming in May, 2010
Zizek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.” There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.
After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture—from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.
The most dangerous philosopher in the West. – Adam Kirsch, The New Republic
See also:
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Apocalyptic Times
Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture Masterclass
Amazon
Upcoming in April, 2010
Slavoj Zizek was born in 1949 and is a Slovenian political philosopher, sociologist, and cultural critic best known for work with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Zizek writes on many topics, including the Iraq War, political correctness, globalization, human rights, and multiculturalism. His thought has received mixed receptions, from celebratory to deeply critical, but his politics are the element that most needs critical reassessment. This book introduces Zizek’s primary areas of interest and the fields in which he has made his most influential contributions: ideology and political subjectivity; political totalitarianism; and contemporary culture. It explores political topics about which Zizek’s interventions have been called partial or flawed, including liberalism, capitalism, the politics of religion, and political decisionism. A final section assesses Zizek and politics today. Each chapter considers the debates in which Zizek has intervened, his position, his positive contribution, and the limits of his position.
Continuum | Amazon | Preview
This is a hugely important book that rediscovers three crucial, but long overlooked themes in German idealism: mythology, madness and laughter. Markus Gabriel, one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary philosophy, and Slavoj Zizek, the celebrated contemporary philosopher and cultural critic, show how these themes impact on the problematic relations between being and appearance, reflection and the absolute, insight and ideology, contingency and necessity, subjectivity, truth, habit and freedom. Engaging with three central figures of the German idealist movement, Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, Gabriel and Zizek, who here shows himself to be one of the most erudite and important scholars of German idealism, ask how is it possible for Being to appear in reflection without falling back into traditional metaphysics. By applying idealistic theories of reflection and concrete subjectivity, including the problem of madness and everydayness in Hegel, this hugely important book aims to reinvigorate a philosophy of finitude and contingency, topics at the forefront of contemporary European philosophy.
O-Books | Amazon
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system – a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it also shows that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program – endemic mental health problems, the proliferation of new forms of bureaucracy – capitalism in fact is anything but realistic. How can capitalist realism be challenged, and can we begin to imagine the unimaginable: an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?
Capitalist Realism includes striking new readings of Children Of Men, the Jason Bourne films, Supernanny and the fiction of Le Guin and Kafka.
This book is a part of ‘Zero Books’, which means that it’s 92 pages long.
See also:
Authors’ Blog
Books Endorsed by Žižek
The MIT Press | Amazon | Download
Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual.
Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.
Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.
See also:
Short Circuits Series
Verso | Amazon | Download
The title of this book is intended as an elementary IQ test for the reader: if the first association it generates is the vulgar anti-communist cliche-”You are right-today, after the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, all the talk about a return to communism can only be farcical!”-then I sincerely advise you to stop here. Indeed, the book should be forcibly confiscated from you, since it deals with an entirely different tragedy and farce, namely, the two events which mark the beginning and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2008.
See also:
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – Lecture at Cooper Union
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – LSE Lecture
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – Economic Crisis and Ideology Critique Today (upcoming)
Les matins de France Culture
MIT Press | Amazon | Download
What if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond’s exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Žižekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan’s neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid.
Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s—the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. Bond takes us inside the perimeter set by police tape, guiding us into a series of explicit, even terrifying, murder scenes. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high-heeled shoe on a kitchen table; carefully folded clothes placed over a chair; a plate of chocolate biscuits on a dinner table; lewd graffiti inscribed on a train carriage door; an arrangement of workman’s tools in a forest clearing. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI’s standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.
See also:
Short Circuits Series
Verso | Amazon | Google Books
In this accessible work, France’s leading radical thinker takes his readers on an incisive journey through twentieth-century philosophy. On the way he pays homage to great thinkers who have influenced him, whether as teachers, allies or opponents: from Althusser, Lacan and Sartre to Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. Although Pocket Pantheon is at times critical, Badiou defends both his subjects and their work by setting them against the contemporary landscape of pop philosophers and media commentators.
Cambridge U. Press | Amazon | Download
Allen Speight argues that behind Hegel’s extraordinary appeal to literature in the Phenomenology of Spirit lies a philosophical project concerned with understanding human agency in the modern world. It shows that Hegel looked to three literary genres–tragedy, comedy, and the romantic novel–as offering privileged access to three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Taking full account of the authors that Hegel himself refers to (Sophocles, Diderot, Schlegel, Jacobi), Allen Speight has written a book with a broad appeal to both philosophers and literary theorists.
See also:
Slavoj Žižek – Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture Masterclass
MIT Press | Amazon | Download
In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion’s illusions; in the other corner, “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries–and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.
See also:
Objet petit a (personal blog of the book’s editor)
The Monstrosity of Christ (lecture)
Slavoj Žižek with John Milbank – The Return of Christ (debate)
Materialism and Theology
Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics Between Fear and Trembling
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
The Death of God: A Continuing Currency?
Short Circuits Series
