Mémoire court / Ce mémoire aborde le défi de l’altérité à l’époque de la technique moderne chez Alain Finkielkraut en trois chapitres. Le premier présente la conception de l’altérité chez Finkielkraut qui se définit par son indisponibilité. Dans La sagesse de l’amour (1984), Finkielkraut désire réhabiliter l’amour pour penser le rapport originel à autrui. Selon lui, ce concept aurait été déconsidéré depuis les Temps modernes, car identifié au besoin « impérialiste » d’agir sur l’Autre et de le posséder. Or, Finkielkraut le conçoit tout autrement. L’amour repose selon lui sur une présence qui ne se laisse pas enclore. Où il y a amour, l’altérité prend toute la place. Dans la relation amoureuse, l’Autre s’installe en nous et nous reste étranger, c’est-à-dire qu’il nous est indisponible. Pour le dire tautologiquement, l’Autre est autre. Finkielkraut pense donc le rapport originel à autrui par l’amour qui, lui, se caractérise plus fondamentalement par l’indisponibilité. Au second chapitre, on s’intéresse à la dialectique entre culture et technique dans Nous autres, modernes (2005). Anciennement, les arts voyaient dans les manifestations particulières de l’être l’opportunité de toucher l’universel alors que la technique tend à uniformiser le monde par son regard. La conclusion importante de ce chapitre est que ce regard technique s’est instauré partout, y compris dans les sciences sociales, ces sciences qui traiteraient des mêmes sujets que les humanités, mais avec la rigueur des sciences naturelles. Dans le dernier chapitre, on verra que les Temps modernes, avec l’instauration de la rigueur du calcul et de la technique, ont affecté la conception de l’altérité. Pour comprendre ce changement, Finkielkraut dans « Peut-on ne pas être heideggérien? » (2015), reprend les grands pans de l’analyse de Martin Heidegger dans ses textes sur la technique moderne. Finkielkraut estime que nous serions rendus à l’époque où l’homme verrait tout, y compris lui-même, comme un fonds disponible. Aux yeux de Finkielkraut, tout devient interchangeable (les lieux, le sexe, les cultures, les populations, etc.) parce que tout devient disponible à l’époque de la technique moderne. Finkielkraut écrira que « nulle altérité ne résiste à l’arraisonnement ». Notre mémoire s’intéressera aux nombreuses conséquences qui découlent de cette disponibilité de l’altérité, notamment la victoire sur la différence et un monde de plus en plus homogène. / To address the challenge of otherness in the age of modern technology in Alain Finkielkraut’s philosophy, three chapters are necessary. The first one presents the conception of otherness in Finkielkraut’s philosophy, which defines otherness by its unavailability. In the Wisdom of Love (1984), he wants to rehabilitate love to think the original relation to the other. For him, this concept would have been dismissed in Modern Times because it was identified with the « imperial » need to act on the Other and to possess him. Finkielkraut conceives love otherwise. Love is a presence that can not be enclosed. Where there is love, otherness takes the entire place. In the love relationship, the Other sets up in ourselves and is a foreigner, which means it is unavailable. To say it in a tautology, the Other is other. Finkielkraut thinks the original relation to the other with love that is defined fundamentally by its unavailability. In the second chapter, our interest will be on the dialectic between culture and technology in Nous autres, modernes (2005). It used to be the casethat the particular manifestations of being that the humanities studied was the opportunity to touch the universal while technology tended to standardize the world by its gaze. The important conclusion of this chapter is that the imprint of technology is now established everywhere, including in the social sciences, who understand themselves as the sciences that treat the same subjects as the humanities but with the same rigor as the natural sciences. In the last chapter, we will see that in Modern Times the urge of calculation and technology have affected the conception of the otherness. To understand this change, Finkielkraut in « Peut-on ne pas être heideggérien? » (2015) draws on large sections of the analysis of the question regarding technology by Martin Heidegger. Finkielkraut thinks that we are living at a time when the human being sees everything, including himself, as available funds (Bestand). In the eyes of Finkielkraut, everything is now interchangeable (places, sex and gender, cultures, populations, etc.) because everything is avaible at the time of modern technology. Finkielkraut writes that « no otherness will resist the arraignment (Gestell)». In this study, we will strive to sort out the consequences that follow from this availability of the other, especially the victory on the difference and a homogeneous world.

Le titre de cette thèse, « Lacan et l’American way of life », est une façon d’interroger Jacques Lacan et les États-Unis afin de savoir pourquoi et comment son enseignement fut, pendant si longtemps, de ce côté-là de l’Atlantique, difficilement pris au sérieux dans la clinique. Si la théorisation lacanienne a été tenue à l’écart de la psychanalyse américaine, c’est parce que celle-ci avait d’autres repères. Nous en isolons trois : l’ego psychology, qui domina l’orientation de la psychanalyse américaine à partir des années 1930 ; Wilhelm Reich, le promoteur de la révolution sexuelle ; et les gender studies, pour lesquelles la psychanalyse est une pratique qui doit être abandonnée car trop soumise aux signifiants du patriarcat. Ces trois scansions – ego psychology, Reich, gender studies – sont trois théories du sexuel qui ont marqué les États-Unis, construisant chacune un sens sexuel qui exclut Lacan des enjeux cliniques. C’est ce que cette thèse se propose de démontrer. En commençant avec la réaction de Lacan à l’ego psychology et son retour à Freud, nous continuons vers la fin de l’enseignement de Lacan (à partir des années 1970) qui fonde une clinique orientée par le réel, qui repense la psychanalyse, y compris ce que Lacan avait d’abord affirmé. Le réel – le concept de réel – sera la boussole qui nous permet de déplier cette démonstration. L’œuvre de Lacan, particulièrement ses dernières formulations commentées par Jacques-Alain Miller, porte en elle des issues aux impasses de l’ego psychology et son culte du Moi, de Reich et sa jouissance phallique génitale, et des gender studies empêtrées dans les identifications et leurs contestations de celles-ci / This thesis, “Lacan and the American Way of Life”, examines Jacques Lacan and the United States in order to understand why Lacan’s teachings have had difficulty being taken seriously in American clinical practice. If psychoanalysts in the United States have kept Lacanian theory at a distance, it is perhaps because of the ways American practice has been oriented. We isolate three orientations: ego psychology, which had a strong influence in the United States as early as the 1930’s; Wilhelm Reich, the Viennese psychoanalyst and brilliant student of Freud who emigrated to the US and became known for his Sexual Revolution; and gender studies which considers that psychoanalysis, being overly subjected to patriarchal signifiers, should be abandoned. These movements represent three modalities of sexual theory that have left their mark on America, each bringing a meaning to sexuality in a way that excludes Lacan’s work. We examine these movements from a Lacanian point of view starting with his response to ego psychology (his return to Freud) and continuing with his later teachings (after 1970) that founded a practice oriented by the real – a re-thinking of psychoanalysis. The Lacanian concept of the real will be the compass that guides us through this demonstration. We will see that Lacan’s works, and especially his later formulations as explained by Jacques-Alain Miller, provide a way out of the impasses of ego psychology and its ego cult, of Reich and his genital phallic jouissance, and of gender studies and their entanglement with identity.

La presente tesis pretende estudiar los textos fílmicos del filósofo francés Alain Badiou con el objetivo de sustraer el papel que juega el cine en su proyecto de (re)comienzo de la filosofía. De esta manera hemos dividido su exposición en dos partes: el estudio de su proyecto de (re)comienzo filosófico y el estudio del papel que juega el cine en dicho proyecto y de su teoría fílmica implícita. En la primera parte trataremos de justificar en qué medida su proyecto puede ser entendido como un intento de reivindicar la tarea filosófica como la eterna tarea de educar a pensar la contemporaneidad de manera universal e igualitaria. Así en primer lugar expondremos como este proyecto tiene sus fundamentos en la teoría de causalidad estructural althusseriana, en la teoría subjetiva de los afectos lacanianos y en la teoría dialéctica maoísta. A partir de cada una de estas teorías definiremos tres dimensiones fundamentales del proyecto filosófico de Badiou, a saber, la dimensión formal o intelectual, la dimensión afectiva o ética, y la dimensión didáctica o igualitaria. Por un lado, veremos cómo las dimensiones intelectual y ética subyacen en la búsqueda de un sistema formal y afectivo, respectivamente, con el que la filosofía puede orientarse en su tarea eterna de pensar en el presente. A este sistema de pensamiento formal-afectivo Badiou le denominará "teoría de del sujeto". Por otro lado veremos cómo, Badiou encuentra en el proyecto platónico de una educación según la universalidad de la Idea -proyecto que Platón desarrolló para hacer frente a la educación según la opinión relativa propia del sofismo dominante de su época-, el modelo al que debe acudir la filosofía para renovarse como pensamiento eterno de la contemporaneidad. Expondremos, por tanto, cómo la renovación de la filosofía contemporánea pasa por concebirla como la puesta en práctica de un proceso pedagógico por el que se transmite un sistema formal y afectivo para pensar el Sujeto o la Idea del presente. / García Puchades, W. (2012). EL LUGAR DEL CINE EN EL PENSAMIENTO FILOSÓFICO DE ALAIN BADIOU [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14862 / Palancia

This dissertation examines the way the Pythagorean conception of the incommensurable structures the assertions of subjective agency in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670), Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), and Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (1988). The Pythagoreans coined the term “incommensurable,” alogos, to describe magnitudes that cannot emerge within a specific system of signification. Across three chapters, I extend the Pythagorean understanding of the incommensurable into the areas of philosophy, religious studies, and mathematics in order to posit the fundamental instability at the core of subjective agency. Moving from Thomas S. Kuhn’s failure to define the incommensurable logically in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions, I argue that such a conception of the incommensurable must be understood as fundamentally faith-based. Given the fact that the incommensurable cannot emerge into signification, its existence must be posited on faith. Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Badiou each move from a faith-based assertion of the incommensurable to offer a conception of subjective agency within a specific system of signification. Thus, against the work of Bonaventura Cavalieri and Evangelista Torricelli, Pascal refigures the incommensurably infinite to establish a heterodox subjective agency within Augustinian faith-by-grace; Kierkegaard manages to navigate the incommensurability of direct communication and personal faith by effacing his pseudonym Johannes Climacus; and Alain Badiou relies on the incommensurable “event” to imagine the possibility the subject’s calling into being of the new. In each of these three texts, the incommensurable functions to guarantee the possibility of subject agency within a specific system of signification.

This dissertation aims to reconfigure 'materialism' against the contemporary context of philosophy. By carrying out a meta-philosophical investigation on the logical schemas, philosophical operations and deployments of the major philosophical projects of Albert Lautman (1908-1944), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), and Alain Badiou (1937- ), i.e., Lautman's philosophy of mathematics (especially the dialectic governing his theory of 'mathematical genesis'), Deleuze's philosophy of difference (especially the logic of event and metamorphosis underlying the 'Deleuzian genesis' extracted from Chapter IV and V of Difference and Repetition), and Badiou's mathematical ontology (especially the fundamental logical schema of his mature ontology presented in Being and Event), this dissertation attempts to show how the works of these three philosophers are contributive to the aforementioned task of the reconfiguration of materialist philosophy. In terms of the problematics of 'formalization of the real', the 'transcendental methodology', and the 'immanent principle' of reality shared by all these three philosophical projects, I propose that their works can be defined as a particular type of materialist philosophy that I call 'transcendental materialism'; and this 'transcendental materialism', in turn, ought to be comprehended according to a modern reading of Platonism, i.e., the non-orthodox re-articulation of Platonic philosophy comprised of Lautman's unorthodox-realist Platonism, Deleuze's materialism as overturned Platonism, and Badiou's materialism with the Platonic Idea. I conclude that Lautman, Deleuze, and Badiou are three philosophers of 'transcendental materialism' knotted by this modern Platonism. On the strength of the 'transcendental materialism' constituted in view of the investigation presented by this dissertation, I intend to show that Lautman's philosophy of mathematics offers the proper perspective or the 'condition' for a genuine comprehension of Deleuze's major philosophical project in the late 1960s; on the basis of this genuine comprehension, Deleuze's philosophical project, which concentrates in the study of the transcendental logic of the real instead of providing empirical knowledge of sensible objects and material entities, ought to be categorized as 'transcendental materialism', a category that is also competent to define Badiou's philosophical project, i.e., 'a materialism without object/matter'; and therefore, the philosophical demarcation within contemporary materialist philosophy ought not to be simply portrayed as 'Badiou vs. Deleuze', 'dialectical materialism vs. vitalist materialism'. The genuine philosophical demarcation within materialism today is 'Idea against Matter'. 'Transcendental materialism' is 'a materialism with the Idea' or 'a materialism of the Idea' which is against the 'naïve materialism' or the 'metaphysics of the Matter'. In case transcendental materialism might have been conceived as a new 'metaphysics', it is the metaphysics of the imperceptible, the inexistent, and the inconsistent. The 'material reality', after 'transcendental materialism', is 'non-All'. Concerning the far more complicated confrontations between different trends of contemporary materialist/realist philosophy, my proposal of constituting the 'transcendental materialism' can be considered as an attempt to reconfigure the current debates on materialist philosophy: to reorganize the dialogues, for instance, between Badiou and his opponents -- 'object-oriented-ontology', 'speculative realism', and 'non-philosophy'; to integrate Quentin Meillassoux's project into transcendental materialism in terms of their shared 'transcendental methodology'; and, most importantly, to 'radicalize' materialist/realist philosophy towards a theory of practice.

No description available.

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.

Thesis advisor: Julian E Bourg / This dissertation explores the paradigm of “industrial society” in French and sociology in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It argues that the term “industrial society” was not a concept, but a series of hypotheses and debates connected to the rise of sociology as a form of public intellectualism and the remaking of European social-democratic thought in the shadow of American hegemony and the Cold War. It shows that while sociologists attributed the concept of “industrial society” to nineteenth-century precursors like Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, it was in fact a thoroughly twentieth-century reworking of the sociological tradition and social-democratic social theory. “Industrial society” was the way that sociologists transposed their radical commitments into social science, embracing a supposedly “realist,” anti-ideological analysis of the social world as the best intellectual path for a modernized reformism that could either embrace the Cold War status quo or push it toward new forms of radicalism. As a conceptual history, the dissertation explores the industrial-society paradigm in four component parts. These included, first, the “logic of industrialization”: debates about nature and future of social development across capitalist and Communist societies, where sociologists often saw family resemblances rather ideologically opposed systems, and replaced a Marxist teleology of class struggle with more ambiguous evolutionary schemas centered on culture, institutions, and technology. Second, the “managerial revolution,” or the expansion since the early twentieth century, of white-collar social strata and the growing importance of bureaucracy and scientific expertise in most domains of society, especially industry and public administration. Third, the “integration of social conflict,” or the idea that the so-called “industrial society” emerging after World War II would or should be able to manage its conflicts—especially labor conflict—by containing them within a set of rules, institutions, and social contracts that advanced social justice but prevented them from threatening the social order itself. Fourth and finally, the “end of ideology,” which suggested that the result of these other social developments would be a society in which passions cooled, grand ideological visions faded, and politics shifted toward expert management. Stated this way the industrial-society paradigm can appear as merely the sociological expression of a centrist and technocratic postwar consensus. The sociological story told here suggests, however, that it was a major modulation of left-wing social thought in Western Europe and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. This dissertation follows a cast of characters as they transposed the radical commitments of the 1930s into social science in the 1940s and 1950s, gradually embracing modernist ideals of value-neutral science and pragmatic social reform. In particular, it shows how the sociology they built remade the political left, providing an alternative public sphere and social vision that helped unite the fractious anti- and post-Communist left in countries like France. Beginning in the 1950s, sociology gradually crept into the public consciousness, filling newspapers and popular magazines, left intellectual journals, think-tanks for technocrats, and state-funded research institutes. The overlapping positions of sociologists in the university, the media, and politics enabled them to evangelize a vision of industrial society to people of influence and even in popular culture. By hovering in an ambiguous space between a moderate reformism and radical social thought, between technocrats and militants, industrial-society sociologists created a distinctive form of twentieth-century social-democratic thought that optimistically saw an automated, socialized, and at least partially planned society emerging, almost of its own accord, from the structural forces driving modern social evolution themselves. Temporally, this vision originated in the 1930s in left critiques of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, crystallized in the mid-1950s, and began to fracture amid the social upheaval of the late 1960s. It would be severely shaken by the social conflict and crisis of the 1970s, but in highly ambivalent ways that often led to industrial-society ideas being transmuted into new forms and mobilized by new social actors. The 1968 generation appeared to mount a critique of the industrial-society paradigm and of its sociological advocates, but they often did so by radicalizing its core notions and, and recovering the romantic and utopian impulses that had gradually disappeared from older sociologists’ thinking. While on balance this dissertation tells a story of the acclimation of French and European social science to American norms, the 1970s fracture of the industrial-society paradigm had effects in France that contrasted with the Anglo-American world, most notably the success of new sociological ideas in politics. Unlike in the United States and United Kingdom, which entered the 1980s under aggressive neoliberal leaders, the French Parti Socialiste won the presidency in 1981 with a brand of modernized socialism that borrowed heavily—at least in the party’s rhetoric—from the radicalized industrial-society vision of the 1970s, precisely the sort of ideological rebranding for the left that sociologists had envisioned decades earlier. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

En considérant les positions de deux philosophes connus dans l'histoire des idées en éducation, à savoir Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Alain, nous tentons de voir quelles sont les principales similitudes et différences entre leurs conceptions philosophiques, premièrement, de la nature humaine, deuxièmement, de l'enfant en tant qu'être éducable et, troisièmement, de l'éducation vue sous l'angle principal de la formation morale et de la formation intellectuelle. Cette présentation de leur pensée éducative est doublée d'une réflexion critique qui prend son inspiration et ses fondements principalement du côté de la philosophie d'Aristote.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, d’abord connu en tant que romancier, a dès le début des années 1960 partagé son temps entre le cinéma et la littérature. Après avoir fourni le scénario de L’année dernière à Marienbad, il est passé derrière la caméra et a réalisé une dizaine de films qui, tant par leur forme que leur propos, poursuivent les recherches esthétiques entreprises dans sa pratique littéraire. Plus encore, il nous semble que le début de cette aventure cinématographique marque un tournant dans son œuvre. Alors que le point de vue qui portait les premiers romans — point de vue que les critiques ont rapproché de celui d’une caméra —, marquait déjà la dimension intermédiale de son œuvre, il apparaît que son passage dans la chaise du réalisateur a été le germe d’une radicalisation de sa pratique. Ainsi, les romans et les films qui ont suivi possèdent une portée intermédiale beaucoup plus large. De fait, c’est l’ensemble de la narration qui s’y trouve remise en question par la mise en évidence des spécificités de chacun des médias et par la transposition de procédés propres à la littérature dans le film, et vice versa. C’est par une étude comparative de La maison de rendez-vous (1965) et de L’homme qui ment (1968) que nous montrons en quoi consiste la relation intermédiale que Robbe-Grillet établit entre les disciplines, en plus de mettre en évidence les mécaniques qui, ancrées dans la matérialité des médias, fondent le roman et le film.