Alain Badiou - Number and Numbers - Reviewed by John Kadvany, Policy & Decision Science/johnkadvany.com - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame Like many philosophers, Alain Badiou relies on technical systems of mathematical logic as a foundation for philosophical exploration. Donald Davidson used Tarski's theory of truth for formal languages to ground his approach to natural language semantics. Modal logic is frequently used to discuss problems of necessity, time, or belief. This review follows those two themes. Badiou's vision in brief: he despairs the lack of objectivity and relativism implicit in the "linguistic turn" -- whether of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, but probably equally much Rorty or Searle -- and so seeks a directly ontological alternative, somehow avoiding constructivist methods. Enter modern set theory, particularly Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory, already essential to Being and Event. The real numbers return us to Badiou. To motivate his project, Badiou's book begins with a history of number concepts in the late 19th century, a critical time in the foundations of mathematics.
Jacques Rancière - Ten Thesis on Politics Jacques Rancière. "Ten Thesis on Politics." in: Theory & Event. Vol. 5, No. 3, 2001. (English). Thesis 1: To identify politics with the exercise of, and struggle to possess, power is to do away with politics. An interrogation into what is 'proper' to politics must be carefully distinguished from current and widespread propositions regarding "the return of the political." Behind the current buffooneries of the 'returns' of the political (that include 'the return of political philosophy'), it is important to recognize the vicious circle that characterizes political philosophy; a vicious circle located in the link between the political relationship and the political subject. What is proper to politics is thus lost at the outset if politics is thought of as a specific way of living. Thesis 2: The formulations according to which politics is the ruling of equals, and the citizen is the one who part-takes in ruling and being ruled, articulate a paradox that must be thought through rigorously.
Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity So I’ve never been interested in producing a theory of literature providing instruments that would make it possible to disclose rules, to explain literary works in general and transmit them. I’ve tried to mark some points of emergence, some points of rupture, some forms of expansion of the meaning of experience, and then to situate their importance vis-à-vis different domains and to make them resonate. For me, what is called literary criticism or film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, but a way of extending them and making them resonate differently. Q) The examples you take in your books on literature pertain to what students of literature call the canon. The question of the canon is not of much interest to me, since I don’t treat literature as an art charged with transmitting a certain cultural legitimacy, and hence with classifying claimants to that legitimacy. IV. Two layers are super-imposed in my interest in film. Yes, you could say that. V.
Jacques Rancière - Professor of Philosophy Jacques Rancière (b. 1940 in Algiers) is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St. Denis). He first came to prominence under the tutelage of Louis Althusser when he co-authored with his mentor Reading Capital (1968). After the calamitous events of May 1968 however, he broke with Louis Althusser over his teacher's reluctance to allow for spontaneous resistance within the revolution. Jacques Rancière is known for his sometimes remote position in contemporary French thought; operating from the humble motto that the cobbler and the university dean are equally intelligent, Jacques Rancière has freely compared the works of such known luminaries as Plato, Aristotle, Gilles Deleuze and others with relatively unknown thinkers like Joseph Jacototy and Gabriel Gauny. For Jacques Rancière, the idea of equal intelligence shines a light on the status of political equality; ordinary people should have a presumption of intelligence, in the same way we offer a presumption of innocence.
Jacques Rancière Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the structural Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.[1] Life and work[edit] Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading Capital (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris; Rancière felt Althusser's theoretical stance didn't leave enough room for spontaneous popular uprising.[2] Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse, such as ideology and proletariat. Influence[edit] Selected bibliography[edit] Rancière's work in English translation Further reading
Set Theory > Basic Set Theory The following basic facts are excerpted from “Introduction to Set Theory,” Third Edition, by Karel Hrbacek and Thomas Jech, published by Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York 1999. 1. Ordered Pairs We begin by introducing the notion of the ordered pair. If a and b are sets, then the unordered pair {a, b} is a set whose elements are exactly a and b. As any object of our study, the ordered pair has to be a set. Definition. If a ≠ b, (a, b) has two elements, a singleton {a} and an unordered pair {a, b}. Theorem. Proof. With ordered pairs at our disposal, we can define ordered triples (a, b, c) = ((a, b), c), ordered quadruples (a, b, c, d) = ((a, b, c), d), and so on. (a) = a. 2. A binary relation is determined by specifying all ordered pairs of objects in that relation; it does not matter by what property the set of these ordered pairs is described. Definition. It is customary to write xRy instead of (x, y) ∈ R. 3. Definition. The Axiom of Extensionality can be applied to functions as follows. Lemma.
Editorial I – The Distribution of the Sensible ‘Me too, I’m a painter!’[1] The current issue evolved from the two-day conference Aesthetics and Politics: With and Around Jacques Rancière co-organized by Sophie Berrebi and Marie-Aude Baronian at the University of Amsterdam on 20 and 21 June 2006. Rancière’s most celebrated contribution to recent aesthetic and political debates is his focus on what he terms le partage du sensible. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed… it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. The (re)distribution of the sensible, for example, is implicit in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991). We know, in fact, that explication is not only the stultifying weapon of pedagogues but the very bond of the social order. II - A Dissensual Community of Equals
VersoBooks.com Jacques Rancière: The Front National’s useful idiots According to the philosopher Jacques Rancière, a number of so-called French ‘republican’ intellectuals have been opening the door to the Front National for some time now. In an interview with Éric Aeschimannm, Rancière shows how universalist values have been perverted to the benefit of xenophobic discourse.
Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics is Politics Sophie Berrebi In the 2005 Venice Biennale, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were represented for the first time in a shared Central Asia pavilion that presented a curious and seductive group exhibition entitled ‘A Contemporary Archive’. Several videos and installations included in the show conveyed a strange feeling of déjà vu, by reworking avant-garde forms of the 1970s and 1980s – Abramovic and Ulay’s Light/Dark (1977), Kabakov’s domestic interiors of Soviet Russia – to make them espouse a search for political and ethnic identity initiated by these new post-soviet republics. Following his work in the field of political philosophy, Rancière’s interest has in recent years shifted towards visual culture and the relation between politics and aesthetics; two fields he perceives as inherently belonging to one another rather than being autonomous. In the ethical regime, exemplified by Plato’s republic, a sculpture is gauged against the question of truthfulness and copy.
Sayers Trans. and introd. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-7067-X. Sean Sayers Jacques Rancière is one of the most important and original contemporary French philosophers. Rancière started as a structuralist Marxist in the 1960s. Though he shares some common ground with others on the left who sought an alternative to Marxism in the aftermath of 1968, Rancière is a strikingly original and distinctive thinker. Since the early 1990s, Rancière's work has increasingly focused on aesthetics. The social order is what Rancière calls a 'police order'. On this account, aesthetics is central to politics. Rancière develops a novel and thought provoking analysis of modernism on this basis. This is just a brief overview of Rancière's ideas. Moreover, there is a puzzling discrepancy between these two levels of analysis (the artistic and the political). However, there is another attitude that can be taken to these issues. Rancière's project is promising.
Badiou: A Philosophy of the New