Peter Hallward – författare

We may yet find a precise use for the notoriously elusive category ‘postcolonial’, but only on the condition that we abandon its usual associations with plurality, fragmentation, particularity and resistance. This book argues that the category is best used to describe an ultimately singular configuration. A singularity is something that generates the medium of its own existence, in the eventual absence of external criteria and other existences. Like other singularities – pertinent comparisons include aspects of Buddhism and Islam, as well as concepts drawn from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou – what is distinctive about a postcolonial discourse or literature is its abstraction from the domain of relationality. Here, Hallward offers a new conceptual distinction between singular and specific modes of differentiation, which should prove influential in a range of discourses.

The most complete and accessible guide in any language to this key contemporary thinkerAlain Badiou is one of the most inventive and compelling philosophers working in France today-a thinker who, in these days of cynical resignation and academic specialization, is exceptional in every sense. Guided by disciplines ranging from mathematics to psychoanalysis, inspired as much by Plato and Cantor as by Mao and MallarmÉ, Badiou’s work renews, in the most varied and spectacular terms, a decidedly ancient understanding of philosophy-philosophy as a practice conditioned by truths, understood as militant processes of emancipation or transformation. This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Badiou’s thought to appear in any language. Assuming no prior knowledge of his work, it provides a thorough and searching overview of all the main components of his philosophy, from its decisive political orientation through its startling equation of ontology with mathematics to its resolute engagement with its principal competition (from Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Deleuze, among others). The book draws on all of Badiou’s published work and a wide sampling of his unpublished work in progress, along with six years of correspondence with the author. Peter Hallward pays careful attention to the aspect of Badiou’s work most liable to intimidate readers in continental philosophy and critical theory: its crucial reliance on certain key developments in modern mathematics. Eschewing unnecessary technicalities, Hallward provides a highly readable discussion of each of the basic features of Badiou’s ontology, as well as his more recent account of appearance and “being-there.” Without evading the difficulties, Peter Hallward demonstrates in detail and in depth why Badiou’s ongoing philosophical project should be recognized as the most resourceful and inspiring of his generation.

Slavoj zek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou's recent work is the event of contemporary philosophy. Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou's work, presents a range of essays which explore Badious most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. Alain Badiou has devised perhaps the only truly inventive philosophy of the subject since Sartre. Almost alone among his peers, Badious work promises a genuine renewal of philosophy, a subject he sees as conditioned by innovation in spheres ranging from radical politics to artistic experimentation to mathematical formalization. Slavoj +a Zi+azek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badious recent work is the event of contemporary philosophy. Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment.Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badious work, presents a range of essays which explore Badious most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.

Slavoj a Zazek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badious recent work is the event of contemporary philosophy. Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badious work, presents a range of essays which explore Badious most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. Alain Badiou has devised perhaps the only truly inventive philosophy of the subject since Sartre. Almost alone among his peers, Badious work promises a genuine renewal of philosophy, a subject he sees as conditioned by innovation in spheres ranging from radical politics to artistic experimentation to mathematical formalization. Slavoj a Zazek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badious recent work is the event of contemporary philosophy. Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment.Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badious work, presents a range of essays which explore Badious most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.

Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life - the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870-71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no revolution can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support.At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, while Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime he was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui's political writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising, and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his main publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui's thought and legacy for the first time.

Long before a devastating earthquake hit in January 2010, Haiti was one of the most impoverished and oppressed countries in the world. However, in the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas ("the flood") sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why the Lavalas governments led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were overthrown, in 1991 and again in 2004, by the enemies of democracy in Haiti and abroad. The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet. Updated with a substantial new afterword that addresses the international response to the earthquake, Damming the Flood is both an invaluable account of recent Haitian history and an illuminating analysis of twenty-first-century imperialism.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential French philosophers of the last century.This book aims to make sense of his fundamental project in the clearest possible terms, by engaging with the central idea that informs virtually all of his work: the equation of being and creativity. It explores the various ways in which, in order to affirm an unlimited creative power, Deleuze proceeds to dissolve whatever might restrict or mediate its expression, including the organisms, objects, representations, identities, and relations that this power generates along the way.Rather than a theorist of material complexity or relational difference, Out of this World argues that Deleuze is better read as a spiritual and extra-worldly philosopher. His philosophy leaves little room for processes of social or historical transformation, and still less for political relations of conflict or solidarity.Michel Foucault famously suggested that the 20th century would be known as 'Deleuzian'; this sympathetic but uncompromising new critique suggests that our Deleuzian century may soon be coming to a close.

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966-69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.This first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation: Alain Badiou, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Serge Leclaire, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, and François Regnault.The book is complemented by a second volume, consisting of essays and interviews that assess the significance and legacy of the journal, and by an online edition of the full set of original Cahiers texts, produced by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and accessible at cahiers.kingston.ac.uk.

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966-69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.Volume One of Concept and Form translates some of the most important theoretical texts from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse; this second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project. It aims to help reconstruct the intellectual context of the Cahiers, and to assess its contemporary theoretical legacy. Prefaced by an overview of the project's rigorous investment in science and conceptual analysis, the volume considers in particular the Cahiers' distinctive effort to link the apparently incommensurable categories of 'structure' and 'subject', so as to prepare for a new synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis.Contributors include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, and Slavoj Zizek.