[csaa-forum] Badiou Melbourne 2014 - Conference on Saturday

[MSCP Convenor]

The public lecture and masterclass have reached capacity and are no longer
available for registration but there are still places available for the
1-day conference on Saturday.
Register here: http://mscp.org.au/badiou-melbourne-2014

1-Day Conference
(Doors open at 9am) 9.30am - 5pm, Saturday, 22 November.
Copland Theatre, 198 Berkeley St ('The Spot'), Unimelb.

The MSCP presents a one-day conference on the work of Alain Badiou. The six
invited speakers will address key aspects Badiou's extensive oeuvre,
offering a range of critical insights into his philosophy. The day will
conclude with a reply by Alain Badiou.

Fees: Unwaged: $40. Waged: $60. Lunch will be provided.

Speakers

Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint
Denis), and was Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He
continues to teach a popular, yearly seminar at the Collège International
de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of over 20 books of philosophy,
several novels and plays and a hyper-translation of Plato's Republic. His
major philosophical works include Theory of the Subject (1982), Being and
Event (1988) and Being and Event II: Logics of Worlds (2005). Being and
Event III: The Immanence of Truths is forthcoming.

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Dr Sigi Jottkandt (UNSW)
Maths in the bedroom: Sex, the Signifier and the Smallest Whole Number

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Dr Ali Alizadeh (Monash)
To Suture or Not to Suture: Poetry and Philosophy in the Thought of Alain
Badiou

The un-suturing of philosophy from literature has been a cornerstone of
Alain Badiou’s thought, resulting in not only a unique philosophy of art –
inaesthetics – but also one of the very few instances of thinking about art
which does not perform a ‘literary theory’ and instead compels a poetics.
But is there a re-suturing of literature and poetics in the work of the
poets Badiou most admires, the paragons of the so-called Age of Poets? This
presentation argues that Badiou’s philosophy of art is one of the most
significant and dynamic contemplations on literature in recent times. It
also proposes an expansion of exemplars of an artistic truth-process beyond
the poet-philosophers central to Badiou’s writing. The presentation
includes a performance of a poem written specifically as both a tribute to
Badiou’s thought and an intervention in the ‘ancient quarrel’ between poets
and philosophers.

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Dr Knox Peden (ANU) - Presenting in Absentia
Badiou's Concept of History

In the interview ‘Beyond Formalization’, Badiou describes his enterprise as
‘one giant confrontation with the dialectic’. This remark buttresses a
schema of interpretation that finds in Badiou’s early and late work a
recasting of dialectical thought that contrasts with the regrettable
abstraction of Being and Event and his writings in the 1990s. The worry is
that a subject grounded in axiomatics rather than dialectics will be
indifferent to the object and immune to the mediations that form the
essential stuff of political practice as a historical phenomenon. The wager
of this talk is that Badiou is in fact closest to history – which is to
say: his vision of history is most incisive – when he is farthest from the
dialectic. From the concern for phenomenal appearance in Logics of Worlds
to the ‘reveil de l’histoire’ sketched in his most recent polemics, Badiou
has progressively re-inscribed the subject in a variety of mediatory
fields. This resurgence of dialectical maneuvers threatens to eclipse the
signal innovation of Being and Event with regard to the subject and its
relation to ‘historical situations’. Neither vector nor site nor totality,
history in a truly objective view is inconsistent multiplicity, and the
only consistency it manifests results from a subjective tenacity impervious
to any alibi the dialectic might seek to supply. To use the language of his
interlocutor Sylvain Lazarus, the difference between the ‘heterogeneous
multiplicity, which denies singularity’ and the ‘homogenous multiplicity’
that sustains ‘historical modes of politics’ is a matter of thought, which
is to say, a matter of subjects. Recusing the dialectic does not take
Badiou’s philosophy away from history; it is what allows the former to
finally discern the latter. The breadth and value of this vision beyond its
descriptive purchase on militants in various fields of subjective
engagement has yet to be adequately appreciated.

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Dr Louise Burchill (VCA)
"Woman"'s Adventures With/in the Universal

In 2011 Badiou gave a conference in which, contrary to his core tenet of
truths' trans-particularity, he was to rather startlingly proclaim that
truth processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual
difference. This paper investigates the tensions in Badiou's conceptual
apparatus that might have led him to this inflexion of his thesis of the
neutrality of the universal by charting the adventures of "woman" with and
in the universal over the course of Badiou's work.

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Dr Jon Roffe (UniMelb)
Deleuze’s Badiou

In a long footnote appended to a restatement of the main themes of Deleuze.
The Clamor of Being, Alain Badiou notes the peculiarity of the text that
Deleuze devotes to his work in What is Philosophy? Indeed, Badiou goes so
far as to write that “I would be grateful to anyone who could clarify this
textual fragment for me, and explain what relation it bears to Being and
Event. This is a genuine invitation, wholly devoid of irony.” The aim of
this paper is to take up this invitation. I will argue that the text is
indeed enigmatic, as Badiou asserts, and moreover that it dramatically
falsifies the main theses of Being and Event. At the same time, it is
possible to reconstruct a critical assertion from Deleuze’s remarks that
poses a fundamental question to the project pursued in Being and Event and
Badiou’s work more generally, around the theme of philosophy’s
conditionality.
I will begin by locating the text (‘Example 12’, WP 151-2) in its immediate
context, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of science as a mode of creative
thinking, and in relation to the attack on logic that occupies the previous
chapter. This reveals the key motivations of the discussion of Badiou. I
will then consider the content of the example itself, and discuss the
points at which it departs from Badiou’s own position in Being and Event.
With these points in hand, then, I will attempt to reconstruct the critical
force of the text, which turns around the claim that Badiou returns us to
“an old conception of the higher philosophy,” (WP 152) that is, that
Badiou’s reconception of the roles of art, science and philosophy
necessarily fails, and does so for reasons relating to the role of logic in
the construction of philosophy’s four conditions.

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Dr Alex Ling (UWS)
An Inessential Art? Positioning Cinema in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

This paper considers Alain Badiou’s understanding of cinema itself – taken
in the generic sense, as an art almost entirely defined by its relation to
other arts (as well as non-art) – while at the same time drawing out some
of the more interesting artistic and philosophical consequences of his
position. Following a brief examination of Badiou’s ‘inaesthetic’
conception of art and its relation to truth and philosophy, I go on to
unpack Badiou’s implicit understanding of cinema as an ‘inessential’ art by
isolating two central complications film presents to his inaesthetic
program, specifically surrounding the crucial concepts of ‘singularity’ and
‘immanence’. I then move on to discuss cinema’s peculiar position among the
arts, before finally addressing a number of paradoxes Badiou’s
understanding of cinema gives rise to, as well as some of the challenges it
presents his philosophical system as a whole.

http://mscp.org.au/badiou-melbourne-2014


-- 
MSCP Convenor,
Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
http://mscp.org.au
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