Bücher veröffentlicht von re.press

In advancing the political project of autonomy, Castoriadis raises the fundamental question: what ought we to think? Following an interpretation of his elucidation of the connections between time, history, and the groundlessness of the world and society, this study argues for a broadening of Castoriadis's question, something which enables attention, not just to the subject matter of thinking, but also its form and the thinker's situatedness. While Castoriadis's insights may be usefully deployed both to expose the limits of inherited thought, which privileges the power of receiving meaning and value over creation and creativity, and to explore the interaction between politics and philosophy, his own approach may well represent the other equally problematic side of the Platonic tradition he criticizes. Consequently, Castoriadis's notions of radical democratic subjectivity and autonomous thinking, both of which respond to the 'ought' question, may inadvertently conform to a mode of being that can do no more than protest the dominant formalism characterising the modern Western world. At the core of this limitation lies a decisive issue for philosophy: whether the enactment of thinking is informed by the historical irruption and retreat of the visionary collective.

In this important new work on the philosophy of German Idealism, Valkanov investigates the Kantian notion of the limits of human cognition and its implication for our understanding and practice of freedom. He then turns to the question of the connection between knowledge and freedom in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Valkanov moves beyond the more traditional and formalized treatments of Kant, by applying the critical analysis of limitation, confusion and conflict to our own ways of thinking. This approach tests the stability of our conceptions and sense of certainty through a voluntary exposure to the destructive force of Kant's transcendental critique. The result is a text which presents the essence of the arguments and exposes the passion that underpins the complex terminology and architectonics of transcendental philosophy. This ground-breaking work restores a sense of wonder at the depths of Kant's transcendental discoveries, the immensity of the challenge that he posed and the intense, living connection between his work and the work of those who succeeded him.

Explores the meaning and politics of place (Roebuck Plains) through Aboriginal narratives, songs, conversations, photographs and paintings, together with European historical, geographic and geological knowledge; linked by a series of explanatory, exploratory and analytical essays on history, anthropology, critical theory and painting; interview with Peter Yu, NAC representative.

Umbr(a) was one of the most important US theory journals of the 1990s and early 2000s, publishing work by some of the greatest philosophers, psychoanalysts and theorists of our era. In every regard, it was ahead of the curve - in content, design, and style - often introducing thinkers who have subsequently become globally influential. This anthology presents a selection of the very best of Umbr(a), including contributions from Joan Copjec, Sam Gillespie, Charles Shepherdson, Russell Grigg, Alenka Zupan?i?, Slavoj ¿i¿ek,Mladen Dolar, Catherine Malabou, Tim Dean, Steven Miller, Dominiek Hoens, Petar Ramadanovic, Sigi Jöttkandt, Colette Soler, Jelica Sumi? and A. Kiarina Kordela.

Stretchmarks of Sun is informed by the crossing of borders-geographical, historical, formal and subjective. It explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of dislocation and reconnection. It is poetry that draws together strands plucked from different disciplines, ways of knowing and art forms to reveal how home is made out of love and language.

This book foregrounds the centrality of political conflicts in the radical philosophy of Alain Badiou. It is divided into two halves. The first undertakes a reading of Badiou''s wider oeuvre (beyond Being and Event) and demonstrates that his political theory derives from analyses of key revolutionary sequences such as the Paris Commune, October ''17, May ''68 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From his evolving meditations on these sequences, and from his theoretical borrowings from Marxism, psychoanalysis and set-theory, Badiou has established a complex schema of the possible outcomes of conflict which constitutes a subtle and flexible theory of change. In the second half, the book applies this schema to a concrete ''situation'': colonial and post-colonial Jamaica. Against the backdrop of the history of conflict in Jamaica, the Morant Bay Revolt of 1865 is interpreted as an ''event'' in Badiou''s very precise sense. The Rastafari movement is then posited as a ''subject body'' faithful to this event, while roots reggae is explored as the ''subject language'' of this Rastafarian subject body. Through this example, it is suggested that the starkness of the account of the event in Being and Event, in its incompatibility with history or culture, must be qualified if Badiou''s contribution to a renewed philosophy of conflict is to be realized. To this end, the book builds on Badiou''s own Logics of Worlds in order to speculatively propose two new concepts: ''evental historiography'' and ''evental culture''. It is argued that conceptual elaborations like these might enable a productive rapprochement between Badiou and Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory - disciplines of which Badiou himself has been extremely critical, but which are certain to shape his reception in the English-speaking world. Conversely, both Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory, precisely in their increasingly enfeebled conceptions of social, cultural and political conflict, stand to gain a great deal from dialogue with the persistently Maoist dimensions of Badiou''s work.

The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics tackles the issue of philosophical materialism in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, enquiring after the source and nature of the 'novelty' that both philosophers seek to discover in the objective world. In this characteristically incisive analysis, Sam Gillespie maintains that, whereas novelty in Deleuze is ultimately to be 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. Gillespie's quest to illuminate the relation of philosophy to the four truth procedures (art, love, science, politics) leads him to the polemical conclusion that, as a transformative rather than descriptive or reflective project, Badiou's philosophy ultimately reclaims the power of the negative from the positivity and pure productiveness of Deleuze's system, freeing thought from the limits set by experience.