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.

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]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14862

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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.

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.

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar ao leitor brasileiro a tradução do romance Mémoires de porc-épic (2006), de Alain Mabanckou. Para chegarmos à tradução, fez-se necessário entender alguns elementos centrais de sua poética e da estrutura narrativa do romance, assim como sua trajetória de vida e obra. Para tanto, discorremos, num primeiro momento, sobre sua visão de mundo e sobre as principais dimensões de sua poética, relacionando-os, sobretudo, ao pensamento rizomático proposto por Édouard Glissant. Em seguida, analisamos o romance em questão atentando para elementos macroestruturais, relacionados à literatura oral tradicional de algumas sociedades africanas de expressão francesa, nos baseando, majoritariamente, nos estudos feitos por Jacques Chevrier, e em elementos microestruturais, concernentes ao uso de repetições, paralelismos, interjeições, léxico africano, provérbios, responsáveis por criar o que Mabanckou chama de ritmo congolês da narrativa. Por fim, destinamos o terceiro capítulo à discussão tradutória, no qual apresentamos nosso projeto de tradução, baseado na abordagem de viés não etnocêntrico proposta, entre outros, por Antoine Berman; e nossa concepção sobre as notas de tradução, levando em consideração, primordialmente, o pensamento de Ana Cristina Cesar em relação ao ritmo na prosa. Apresentamos as notas de tradução divididas em dois blocos, o semântico e o sintático, ambos em diálogo com o que entendemos ser o ritmo da narrativa. A tradução completa é vista no anexo. / The aim of this work is to present to the Brazilian public the translation of Mémoires de porc-épic (2006), a novel by Alain Mabanckou. In order to arrive at the translation, it seemed necessary to have a more in-depth understanding of some of the central elements of the poetic and narrative structure of the novel, as well as the authors life and work. Therefore, we at first discuss his worldview and the main dimensions of his poetics; relating them, especially, to the concept of rhizome proposed by philosopher Édouard Glissant. Then, we analyze the novel in question, with attention to the macrostructural elements related to traditional oral literature in some African societies of French expression, drawing mainly on studies by Jacques Chevrier, as well as microstructural elements concerning the use of repetitions, parallelisms, interjections, African vocabulary and proverbs, responsible for creating the Congolese rhythm of the narrative. Finally, the third chapter discusses the translation and presents the translation project, drawing upon the non-ethnocentric approach proposed, among others, by Antoine Berman, and our conception of the translation notes, taking into account primarily the thoughts of Ana Cristina Cesar regarding rhythm in prose. The translation notes are divided into two blocks, semantic and syntactic, which are both in dialogue with what we understand to be the rhythm of the narrative. The full translation is located in the Annex.

Habilitationsschrift--Constance. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-193) and index.