The present project draws on recent work in philosophy--primarily that of Alain Badiou--in order to re-conceptualize the concepts of "citizen," "citizenship" and "nation." I aim to recuperate the notion of universal citizenship and reframe the immigration debate in the U.S. by proposing a conception of citizenship that does not rely on identity or state recognition. I define the citizen as a collective subject made up of anyone who in a given juridico-political situation transforms that situation on the basis of an affirmation of equality. I propose that citizenship, to the extent that it transforms the basic organizational coordinates of a situation, is itself on the border of legality/illegality. In chapter one, I theorize universal citizenship as an egalitarian democratic act foundational of a new order and, drawing on Habermas (1995) and Hobsbawm (1992), identify in the French Revolution two articulations of the relationship between citizenship and nation: one that sees nation as pre-existing and determining citizenship, and another that takes citizenship to be constitutive of nation. I argue that these conceptions still underpin competing understandings of politics today, especially with regard to the role of identity in politics. In chapter two, I analyze the confluence between the criminalization of undocumented immigration in the U.S. and neoliberal governmentality. I argue that a politics thought from the perspective of the undocumented immigrant also points to the necessity of affirming a political logic over economic imperatives. I claim that the 2006 immigrant rights protests in the U.S. can be understood as instances of universal citizenship to the extent that they included undocumented people and thus challenged a statist distinction foundational of U.S. political order: the difference between citizen and non-citizen as regulating access to the legal right to act politically. In the last chapter, I read Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People as proposing a generic, and thus non-identitarian and universalistic, conception of the political collective in the very category of "cockroach." I highlight the ways in which it resonates with the revolutionary idea of nation identified by Hobsbawm and Habermas.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of French and Italian, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68).

Propõe-se examinar o processo de afirmação de novos direitos, tomando por ponto de partida o pensamento dos filósofos Alain Badiou e Antônio Negri, de quem se realiza uma leitura seletiva e intensiva das obras. Disserta-se sobre a articulação entre ontologia, evento e poder constituinte, como polos para uma teoria do sujeito. Trata-se da questão da afirmação de direitos além, ou antes, de o estado reconhecê-los. Um direito vivo liberto das mediações do estado e do mercado. O direito como potência e não sob a espécie da norma. Discutem-se ainda os conceitos de direito singular e direito comum. O sujeito em pauta é o sujeito comunista, interno ao movimento real de abolição do estado de coisas, na esteira de Karl Marx. Outros autores abordados com frequência são Spinoza e Hegel. Apresentam-se brevemente o método da copesquisa militante (do operaísmo autonomista), o materialismo dialético da cisão (Badiou) e a práxis constituinte (Negri). Mais além de uma discussão restrita ao campo de filosofia política, adota-se a perspectiva de que o pensamento é imediatamente político, que se pode exercer uma política na filosofia e produção do conhecimento. Conclui-se com o cotejamento entre as teorias do sujeito de Negri e Badiou, quanto aos pontos desdobrados neste trabalho, e como esse parcial encontro pode potenciar ferramentas práticas e teóricas. Especial destaque na conclusão, ao duplo processo pars construens pars destruens, para uma política subversiva e radical. A mútua implicação de um e outro é vital para a capacidade um movimento real transformar o estado das coisas. / This dissertation addresses the issue of how to create new rights, breathing the air of the radical thought of Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri, from whom it has been made an intensive and selective review. It goes over the articulation of ontology, event and constituent power, as polarities for a theory of the subject. The question in discussion is about rights beyond, or before, the state recognizes them. A living law freed from states or markets mediations. Law as power [potentia], and not sub species of the norm. Singular right and common right are also discussed. The subject in question is communist subject, internal to the real movement for the abolition of the present situation, following Marx. Other authors frequently referred: Spinoza and Hegel. Some methodological aspects are presented briefly: con-ricerca (of operaismo autonomist), dialectical materialism of scission (Badiou) and constituent praxis (Negri). Beyond some debate limited to political philosophy field, this work adopts premise that thinking is immediately political, and that there can be exerted a political intervention in philosophy itself and knowledge production. The conclusion puts Negris and Badious theories of subject to interact, on points developed through the text, aiming hopefully to contribute for some practical or theoretical tools. A special remark must be made for the importance of the double procedure pars construens pars destruens, for a truly subversive and radical politics. The mutual incidence of one over the other is vital for any movements real capacity of transformation.

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.

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)

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a post-relational reading of the programme of relational art and its influence upon current aesthetics. ‘Post’ is not used in the indicative sense here: it does not simply denote the passing of the high water mark of relational art’s critical reception. Rather, it seeks to identify what remains symptomatically unresolved in relational art through a reading of its texts together with its critique. Amongst these unresolved problems certain questions endure. The question of this art’s claim to autonomy and its problematic mode of appearance and materialism remain at large. Ironically it shares the same fate as the avant-garde it sought to distance itself from; the failure to unite art with the everyday. But it has nevertheless redefined the parameters of artistic production: this is its success. I argue that this is because relational art was internally riven from its outset by a contradiction between its micropolitical structures and the need to find a mode of representation that did not transgress its self-imposed taboo upon visual representation. I identify a number of strategies that relational art has used to address this problem: for example its transitive ethics and its separation of ‘the visual’ from formal representations of public space and of a liminal counter-public sphere. Above all, I argue that its principle of the productive mimesis and translation of social relations through art is the guarantor of this art’s autonomy. My thesis is premised upon the notion that one can learn much about new forms of critical art from the precepts and suppositions that informed relational aesthetics and its critical reception. Relational aesthetics, in fact, establishes the terms of engagement that inform new critical art. Above all, this is because the question of the ‘relation of non-relation’ is bigger than relational aesthetics. The ‘relation of non-relation’ does not denote the impossibility of relation between subjects. Rather, it is a category that identifies non-relation as the very source of productive relations. This can be applied to those liminal points of separation that 6 delineate the territory of critical art prior to relational aesthetics. For example, these instances of ‘non-relation’ appear in the separation of art from non-art; of representation from micropolitics and of the anti-relational opposition of the philosophical categories of the general and the particular. Overall, I seek to reclaim Bourriaud as instrumental to the re-thinking of these categories and as essential to a reading of current critical art discourse. I identify a number of misreadings of relational aesthetics that result from a misrecognition or unwillingness to engage with Nicolas Bourriaud’s direct influences: Serge Daney, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser are often overlooked in this respect. I argue that Bourriaud’s critics tend to bring their own agendas to bear on his work, often seeking to remediate what is problematic. These critiques introduce existing aesthetic and political paradigms into his work in order to claim him as their own. So for example we encounter antagonistic relational aesthetics as the reinstatement of the avant-garde. Also, relational aesthetics as an immanent critique of the commodity form within a selective reading of Theodor Adorno. Also, we encounter dissensual relational aesthetics as ‘communities of sense’ that adopt site-specific methodologies whose mode of inhabitation of the socius is a reaction to relational aesthetics and is premised upon separatism. This diversification of relational art’s critique does not address, however, its fundamental problems of autonomy and representation. Rather, in different ways, they sidestep these issues and duplicate their non-relationality in the form of an impasse. My reading seeks to read the relational programme as a whole and to reclaim that which is symptomatically post-relational within it. I think that this is important because the critique of Bourriaud is presently unduly weighted towards the analysis of Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods, (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002)), thus important developments within Postproduction (2002) and The Radicant(2009) have gone overlooked. Specifically, Bourriaud’s increased emphasis upon a topology of forms and an Althusserian ‘aleatory materialism’ demand that we ask whether relationality in art is ontological or epistemological in form. It also demands that we re-consider its claims to materialism and critical realism on its own terms. Bourriaud’s later works are important not simply because they set out how relational art might inhabit networks of electronic communication but because they begin to develop a more coherent thinking of new modes of relational representation. Bourriaud begins to address the aporia of micropolitics and representation in his later works. His notion of representation becomes increasingly a matter of spatio-temporal relation and the representational act becomes increasingly identified with the motility of the relational act as a performative presentation. In the light of these developments, I argue that the thinking of relation that has thus far dictated the philosophical analysis of relationality and political aesthetics results in an acute anti-relationality or a ‘relational anarchism’. This is why the philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou respectively, are inadequate to the demands of current aesthetics. In fact they hinder its development. On this basis I turn to Rodolphe Gashé’s re-thinking of relation. His thinking grants relation a minimal ontology that in fact excludes it from philosophy, but at the same time, plays a key role in the construction of singularities as new epistemological categories. Gashé suggests a unique epistemological value for relations and recognizes what is evental within them. These singularities find their modes of appearance within various forms of the encounter. Gashé’s thought is helpful in that it identifies the non-relational of relation with its event. Also, I argue that a theory of post-relational representation is necessary to address the ‘weak manifestations of relational art’, although not in a transgressive or messianistic form; also, that this thinking of representation, when combined with aleatory materialism, produces a 8 broad constituency of representational forms with which to construct a more robust critical art. This includes the documentary form. In order to address the objections of micropolitics I therefore advance Philip Auslander’s notion of the performativity of the document as essential to relational aesthetics because it is an art form that in fact requires mediation by the visual. My argument is premised upon the ineliminability of representation from the aesthetic and moreover, that the artwork is constituted within a broad nexus of operations and acts of signification. This fragmentary construction is the source of the objectivity or critical realism of these practices. I argue that ‘visual’ documentation functions as a tool for presencing and connecting relations of exchange but is merely one of the forms of representation available to visual artists.

Aiming to make an intervention in critical theory, film-philosophy and British Cinema scholarship, this thesis investigates what a marriage of Lacanian and Badiouian theories of the subject can bring to the study of the radical British feature film of 1968: films which in differing ways represent the political and intellectual debates current in the culture. The question of what can be learnt through an analysis situated within theories of the subject has not been addressed within British Cinema studies. Psychoanalytic film theory in its previous incarnations utilised a section of Lacan's thought in order to focus on the ways in which the spectator was placed into a subject position by the unseen workings of the apparatus. Furthermore, the limited amount of Badiouian film scholarship is concerned with whether films can be thought philosophically. A fuller use of Lacan with Badiou as a hermeneutic model to address films from a specific period and context creates a new interpretive model on the porous boundary between critical theory and film-philosophy. This thesis utilises Lacan's categories of the Imaginary, Symbolic and, predominantly, the Real alongside the Badiouian Event to interrogate the ways in which Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966), Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967), Herostratus (Don Levy, 1967), Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970) and if ... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) represent the radical subject of 1968, in order to argue for the efficacy of ideological critique, to think politically about cinema, and advocate the continuing resonance of the period in contemporary praxis.