I stand by the ‘politics of prescription’ that I outlined back in 2005, and that Timothy Kaposy has kindly taken the time to consider in his article above. I think the general emphasis on universalisable and egalitarian principle, on subjective commitment and resolve, on the logic of consequence and anticipation, on an engagement with the […]
“Philosophy is first and foremost this: the invention of new problems.” -Alain Badiou Published in 2004 with South Atlantic Quarterly, Peter Hallward’s essay “The Politics of Prescription,” is one of the most instructive responses to the philosophy of Alain Badiou to date. The essay breaks from the usual commentary about Badiou to explain a decrease […]
The philosophical injunction to grasp one’s time in thought is beset today by an oscillation between disorienting anxiety and a renascent enthusiasm. The anxiety is determined by the objective temporality of crisis, understood, in keeping with the medical derivation of the term from Hippocratic medicine, as that phase “in which a decision is due but […]
Applied to education, Alain Badiou’s work on ethics fundamentally challenges a dominant contemporary vision of education as a sophist’s affair (Bartlett, 2011; and as detailed in the North American context, see den Heyer, 2009a). This is a kind of education marked, first, by what A. J Bartlett explores as the ‘sophistic end (of preparing the […]
“Philosophy, which requires the deployment of four conditions, cannot specialize in any one of them.” -Alain Badiou, Metapolitics. “[…] la détermination de l’essence de la politique, ne pouvant s’assurer ni de la structure (inconsistance des ensembles, dé-liaison) ni du sens (l’Histoire ne fait pas tout), n’a d’autre repère que l’événement.” -Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la […]
In “Politics in the Wake of Actually Existing Zeal,” after trying to explain some of the reasons for the urgency and necessity of Alain Badiou’s interventions in the current debate over philosophy and politics, Andrew Pendakis in his inimitable style—just look at the devastating sarcasm of the title alone—raises a set of “irritating questions” with […]
Today’s first impressions leave us little room for doubt that between philosophy and politics there is nothing more to be said. Insofar as the former names a beleaguered, culturally peripheral disciplinary practice, it shares with stenography and bowling that dusty sense of lost necessity proper to all extinct, but once glowingly actual life-forms and habits. […]
The American penal system is perhaps the world’s greatest example of neoliberal reform wherein prisoners’ access to university education is posited as the means to transform “criminal” into “citizen.” As female professors teaching all-male students in a particular MA Humanities course in the Texas state penitentiary, we have the opportunity to address the problematic assumptions […]
1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to problematize the taken-for-granted understandings of “poverty” within “feminization of poverty” discourse.[1] Proposed here is an alternative research frame focused on ascertaining how poverty governance produces feminized subjectivities, a lens that would focus on feminization through poverty. The phrase “feminization of poverty” entered scholarly discourse in 1978 […]
This paper discusses women’s relation to land and landed property through an examination of gender relations with regard to land rights and within agrarian reforms. Women’s – especially married women’s – relation to land often has implications for their status as members of a social and political collective. Moreover, land remains an important livelihood resource […]