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anamnesis

The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision

by Toula Nicolacopoulos

Despite political theorists' repeated attempts to demonstrate their incoherence liberal values appear to have withstood the test of time. Indeed, engagement with them has become the meeting point of the different political philosophical traditions. But should radical critique justifiably become a thing of the past? Should political philosophy now be conducted in the light of the triumph of liberalism? These are the wider questions that the book takes up in an attempt to demonstrate the intellectual power of systemic critique in the tradition of Hegel. The author argues that the most ambitious of the communitarian critiques of liberal thought failed due to a fundamental weakness of their philosophical methodology. Moreover, the re-workings of these critiques by feminists, discourse ethicists, postmodern and postcolonial theorists have been equally unsuccessful because they have not traced the individualist commitment of liberal theory back to its source in liberal inquiring practices. Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, including John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Charles Larmore and Will Kymlicka, the book demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of a critical philosophical methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices.

by Sam Gillespie

In this characteristically incisive analysis, Sam Gillespie maintains that, whereas novelty in Deleuze is ultimately located in a Leibnizian affirmation of the world, for Badiou, the new, which is the coming-to-be of a truth, must be located at the 'void' of any situation. Following a lucid presentation of the central concepts of Badiou's philosophy as they relate to the problem of novelty (mathematics as ontology, truth, the subject and the event), Gillespie identifies a significant problem in Badiou's conception of the subject which he suggests can be answered by way of a supplementary framework derived from Lacan's concept of anxiety.

by Geoff Boucher

Set against the collapse of social theory into a theory of ideological discourse, Geoff Boucher sets to work a rigorous mapping of the contemporary field, targeting the relativist implications of this new form of philosophical idealism. Offering a detailed and immanent critique Boucher concentrates his critical attention on the ‘postmarxism’ of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. Combining close reading and careful exposition with polemical intent, Boucher links the relativism exemplified in these contemporary theoretical trends to unresolved philosophical problems of modernity. In conclusion Boucher points to ‘intersubjectivity’ as an exit from postmarxist theory’s charmed circle of ideology.

by Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (editors)

Table of Contents

AESTHETICS and PHILOSOPHY
Henry Sussman — Booking Benjamin: The Fate of a Medium
Winfried Menninghaus — On the ‘vital significance’ of Kitsch. Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘bad taste’
Michael Mack — Modernity as an unfinished Project: Benjamin and Political Romanticism
Robert Sinnerbrink — Violence, Destruction and Sovereignty: Derrida and Agamben on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’
Joel Morris — Graves, Pits and Murderous Plots: Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and the German Mourning Play’s Dreary Tone of Intrigue
George Markus — Benjamin’s Critique of Aesthetic Autonomy
Andrew Benjamin — Justice and Theology

CITIES and IMAGES
Peter Schmiedgen — Interiority, Exteriority and Spatial Politics in Benjamin’s Cityscapes
Jo Law — Time without End: exploring the temporal; experience of Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 through Walter Benjamin
Alex Regier — Architecture of the Pavement: Street Maps and the Linguistic Cosmos
Carlo Salzani — Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapapsarian Chile
Tara Forest — ‘Strange Construct’: Benjamin on History and Film

by Sigi Jöttkandt

First Love: A Phenomenology of the One takes seriously literature’s repeated attestations of a One in its stories, poems and plays entitled First Love. With this groundbreaking work, Jöttkandt suspends the contemporary philosophical stricture against every idea of a whole to unmask the figure concealed behind the psychoanalytic myth of first love.

by Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos and Paul Ashton (editors)

“it belongs to the weakness of our time not to be able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit, to feel crushed before them, and to flee from them faint-hearted.” (Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, v2, p. 10)

Is it becoming more obvious today that the thinkers of the post-Hegelian era were/are not “able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit”? Is our era the era of the “faint-hearted” philosophy? Celebrating 200 years since the publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit this volume addresses these questions through a renewed encounter with Hegel’s thought.

The Praxis of Alain Badiou

by Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens (editors)

The Praxis of Alain Badiou takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticising Badiou’s stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou’s concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognised as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou’s work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.

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