This dissertation examines D.H. Lawrence’s and Wyndham Lewis’s exploration of the evental subject, and asks how their work might help us understand agency in a way that does not discount powerful forms of socio-historical determinism. Examining a variety of their critical and fictional writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, I argue that Lawrence and Lewis explore ways of thinking about the subject’s relationship to radical novelty without occluding the constraining forces of mass culture. Challenging conventional modernist forms of novelty which seek to except themselves from forces of historical and social determination, they pursue a form of novelty that emerges from these forces, yet radically reconfigures the world that history has produced. Similarly, even though the “evental subject” is conditioned by the forms of relation encoded by society, its agency lies in the power to transfigure the modes of being that have been normalized. The evental subject is not an autonomous source of agency that is exempted from the social order, but derives its agency from reconceptualizing the nature of social embeddedness—understanding social relations as unpredictably generative rather than narrowly limiting. In this regard, the forms of subjectivity articulated by Lawrence and Lewis substantially anticipate, and are illuminated by, Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. Chapter 1 argues that Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature approach the problem of the evental subject largely in terms of affect, understanding the subject not as the preexistent and stable bearer of affective experience, but as the processual product of mutually-constituting affective relationships. Chapter 2 examines Women in Love to find Lawrence negotiating love as an affective site of radical subjective possibility that reconfigures the cultural norms through which intimate relationships are coded and constrained. Chapter 3 turns to Lewis’s The Enemy to ask how his version of the evental subject largely inhabits the tension between personality and selfhood, where the former suggests social performance and the latter denotes an autonomous, ontological category. Contra the conventional turn to the autonomous self as the source of agency, he seeks to understand the subject, and its agency, as the product of social performance. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Tarr articulates the possibilities of a radically exteriorized understanding of personality; through Lewis’s ironic portrayal of the ineluctable ways in which even the perception of choice is coded by the situation, he presents fiction and authorship as the spaces in which to imagine an evental subject.

[pt] A partir dos movimentos de maio de 1968, a figura intelectual da emancipação toma conta da filosofia francesa: enquanto Jacques Rancière aposta na radical hipótese da igualdade das inteligências, Alain Badiou desenvolve uma teoria do acontecimento. Em comum, concernem a ambos processos de subjetivação, dentre os quais Badiou destaca quatro: amorosos, científicos, políticos e artísticos. Neste âmbito, o regime estético rancièriano e a inestética badiousiana oferecem aporte teórico para reformular as categorias segundo as quais se compreende a criação artística – em geral – e o cinema – em particular. No entendimento comum de uma arte contemporânea das relações, este trabalho aproxima os autores com o objetivo de pensar a obra do diretor austríaco Michael Haneke. Dividindo seus filmes em blocos temáticos – entre cinema e amor, entre cinema e ciência, entre cinema e política e entre cinema e outras artes –, investigam-se distâncias e intervalos pelos quais podem passar ideias e nos quais se formam espectadores como sujeitos igualitários. / [en] From May 68 on, the intellectual figure of emancipation takes over French philosophy: while Jacques Rancière bets on the radical hypothesis of the equality of intelligences, Alain Badiou develops the theory of the event. In unison, both are concerned with processes of subjectivation, amongst which Badiou highlights four types: amorous, scientific, political and artistic. In this last scope, the rancièrian aesthetic regime and the badiousian inaesthetics offer a theoretical approach to reformulate the categories within which art – in general – and cinema – in particular – are perceived. In the common understanding of contemporary art of relations, this work links the authors, intending to analyze the work of Austrian director Michael Haneke. Splitting his movies into thematic blocks – between cinema and love, between cinema and science, between cinema and politics and between cinema and other arts –, the investigation lies on the distances and intervals within which ideas pass and spectators form themselves as egalitarian subjects.

The theoretical framework of this study is intended to explore the potential Alain Badiou's theory of event, truth, and faithful subject may provide for understanding literature. This study applies this framework to John Ruskin's late and lesser-known work Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-1884). Both Ruskin's fragmented style in Fors Clavigera and his notion of historical truth developed therein have been read as madness and as reactionary romanticism. I examine key metanarrative moments in Fors Clavigera where Ruskin reflects on his historiographical choices and methods. Through my analysis, I show how Badiou's theory provides a way of better understanding Ruskin's historiography as deliberately purposeful and philosophically engaging.

In our thesis we will discuss political philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. Our aim is to explore his thoughts in the context of searching for an emancipatory strategy for 21st century. In first par of our thesis we will concentrate on the analysis of functioning of capitalism from the perspective of Lacan's discourse of university. Then we will move to the criticism of static subject in Marxism and dispersed subject in thoughts of post-Marxist radical democrats. We will continue to so called communist hypothesis. In second part of our thesis we will discuss how Žižek's theoretical approach affects his position to the three selected social conflicts and movements. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

With its perennial interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of small-town people, Alice Munro’s fiction displays a deceptively simple surface reality that on closer scrutiny reveals intricate levels of unexpected complexity about the fundamentals of human experience: love, choice, mortality, faith and the force of language. This study takes as its main purpose the exploration of Munro’s stories in terms of the intricacy of emotions in the face of commonplace events of life and their emerging possibilities. I argue that the ontological levels of fiction and reality remain in the realm of the real; these levels exist and merge as the possibilities of each other. Munro’s realism is explored in terms of its connection to possibilities that arise out of a particular type of fatality. The phenomenon of possibility permeates Munro’s stories. An investigation of this phenomenon shows a curious paradox between possibility and necessity. In order to discuss the complexity of this paradox I introduce the temporal/spatial concept of possibility-space and notions of the fatal. I describe the space that materializes in the phenomenal field between text and reader, and where the constitution of possibility becomes visible. This is typically seen in the rupture that is the event, where the event in itself offers a moment of release and epistemic certainty to the characters. I argue that through this release and certainty the characters obtain a radical, audacious sense of freedom and intensity of life. The stories examined have been grouped in a conceptual order that brings into view the central qualities of Munro’s fiction such as lightness, newness and sameness. These qualities are related to the act of recognition; they are elaborated through readings of a large number of stories from all the collections, including three stories published recently in The New Yorker. The dissertation concludes by highlighting these qualities in the tour de force “Post and Beam.” I argue finally that Alice Munro’s fiction recognizes life as possibility in a moment when it shows itself in its own remarkable sameness.

The thesis offers an interpretation of Paul's political thought and political theology in the context of current philosophy. The first part presents a methodological basis of the work: the concept of political theology is conceived as a methodological tool that enables us to concentrate on interrelations and mutual effects of religion and politics and to expose implicit or explicit political meanings and implications of religious ideas. The second methodological subchapter deals with Max Weber's approach to "economic ethics of world religions": Weber concentrates on historical crossroads and switches which are a result of random chain of coincidences and factors forming a specific relation to values (Wertbeziehung) which enables us to understand further historical development. Paul's missionary activity and theology is seen as such historical crossroad with far- reaching social consequences. Another part elaborately deals with the most important and influential interpretations of Paul in current non-Christian philosophy: Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben. The attention is given not only to presentation of their interpretations but also to utilizations and interpretative gaps, which could be observed in the way these authors read and understand Paul. Though for different reasons, for all of them...

The thesis offers an interpretation of Paul's political thought and political theology in the context of current philosophy. The first part presents a methodological basis of the work: the concept of political theology is conceived as a methodological tool that enables us to concentrate on interrelations and mutual effects of religion and politics and to expose implicit or explicit political meanings and implications of religious ideas. The second methodological subchapter deals with Max Weber's approach to "economic ethics of world religions": Weber concentrates on historical crossroads and switches which are a result of random chain of coincidences and factors forming a specific relation to values (Wertbeziehung) which enables us to understand further historical development. Paul's missionary activity and theology is seen as such historical crossroad with far- reaching social consequences. Another part elaborately deals with the most important and influential interpretations of Paul in current non-Christian philosophy: Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben. The attention is given not only to presentation of their interpretations but also to utilizations and interpretative gaps, which could be observed in the way these authors read and understand Paul. Though for different reasons, for all of them...

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Based on extended research on Chinese medical and epidemiological archival material dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, and on six months of internship in epidemiology in Beijing’s Medical School and in Haidian District’s Centre of Disease Control and Prevention, this thesis explores the conjunction of three major epidemiological crises in modern Chinese history with processes of State formation: the 1911 Manchurian pneumonic plague, the 1952 germ-warfare, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Analysing the three crises as Events in line with Alain Badiou’s epistemology it seeks to establish how different strategies of governmental fidelity to the imagined cause of each crisis have led to distinct modes of organisation and valorisation of the social: Republican China and its decline to fascism; the clash between professional revolutionaries and technocrats in Maoist China; and the emergence of the “Harmonious Society” of mass exploitation and repression today. This conjunction between State formation and epidemiological Events is explored with the use of Foucault’s genealogical method in a quest for a historical materialist approach that posits at its epicentre processes of class composition, decomposition and recomposition, and their contested enclosure by the governmental apparati of capture. The present thesis thus examines the three major epidemiological crises of modern China as forming grounds for biopolitical strategies that give rise to modes of subjectivation and circuits of debt/guilt within the context of the class struggle. And at the same time, it aims to create a new field of investigation for anthropology: the relation of State and Event, from a viewpoint that contests the accepted relation of event and structure expounded by Marshall Sahlins, proposing as the main object of this investigation the conjunction between necessity and will that can never be reduced either to the naturalism of historical determinism, nor to the culturalism of subjective contingency.

The thesis takes the French revue Lignes (1987-present) as its object of study to provide a new account of French intellectual culture over the last twenty-five years. Whilst there are now many studies covering the role of such revues throughout the twentieth-century, the majority of such monographs extend no further than the mid-1980s: the major novelty of this thesis is extending these accounts up until the present moment. It is largely assumed that a reaction against the Marxist and structuralist theories of the 1960s and 1970s led to embrace of liberalism and an intellectual drift to the right in France from the 1980s onwards: whilst largely supporting this account, the thesis attempts to nuance this narrative of the fate of the intellectual left in the following years by showing the persistence of what can be called a politicised 'French theory' in Lignes, and a returning left-wing militancy in recent years. In doing so, it will both reveal under-studied aspects of well-known thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, as their thought develops through their participation in a collaborative, periodical publication, and introduce lesser known thinkers who have not received an extended readership in Anglophone spheres. Lignes also argues for the continued persistence and relevance of the thought of a previous generation of thinkers, notably Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo, and the thesis concludes by examining the potential role 'French Theory' could still have in France. Furthermore, as revues provide a unique nexus of intellectual, cultural, social and political concerns, the thesis also provides a unique history of France from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2007 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. Much of the thesis is concerned with contextualising intellectual debates within a period characterised by the moralisation of discourses, a return of religion, the global installation of neo-liberalism and the eruption of immigration as a controversial European issue. From a relatively theoretical and politically stable position to the left of the Parti socialiste, Lignes therefore provides a privileged vantage point for the mutations in French social and cultural life throughout the period.