We are in Madrid for a conference on “the posthuman”, and taking in the wonderful art and architecture in this capital city of Spain, including the treasures of the Prado, such as their Goya, Velazquez and Bosch collections. Several papers at this thought-and-action-provoking gathering of scholars committed to change in a world being suffocating by […]
political
Posted inBusiness, General, News/Politics
Derrida and the present world (dis-)order
Anyone who believes that the present world-dispensation is one of “order”, merely has to scan all the many sources of information to be disabused of such an illusion. In doing so, however, they would probably not realise that, as Derrida (1994; see below) enables one to see, these very news sources — mainly television, the […]
Posted inGeneral
Farewell, my queen, farewell greed
The French Revolution, triggered by the storming of the Bastille in 1789, was an “event” in Badiou’s sense of a history-changing occurrence made possible by a large number of individuals acting in concert to achieve a certain goal. This event is vividly brought to life – albeit from a distance – in Benoit Jacquot’s wonderfully […]
Posted inGeneral
The (ir-)rational market versus democracy
The e-tolling debacle concentrates, in microcosmic format, the tension — if not the opposition — between the market and democracy, even if many regard the “free market” as the zenith of democracy. Or, to put it differently, this tension — which is always there — establishes the economic domain and the political in a specific […]
Posted inGeneral
Alain Badiou, the “event”, and political subjectivity
Alain Badiou, whose work is, as far as I can tell, not widely known in the English-speaking world – where Peter Hallward has done a lot to compensate for this lack – is a contemporary thinker who has done much to refine the philosophical understanding of the human subject. As Hallward observes (in the Translator’s […]