Writing in the Still

Literature & Fiction

BENJAMIN, Andrew

Poetry

re.press

Following the publication of his magnum opus L'être et l'événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France's greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticizing 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 recognized as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou's work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.

The Praxis of Alain Badiou (Anamnesis)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

The great 13th century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar is renowned as an author of superb short lyrics written in the Persian language. Dealing with themes of love, passion and mysticism, the versions presented in this book are the first sustained offerings of Attar¿s lyric poetry in English. Award-winning Iranian-born poet, Ali Alizadeh, and Persian specialist, Kenneth Avery, have collaborated on this project which aims to bring this remarkably vigorous yet subtle poetry to an English reading audience. The translations are accompanied by the Persian texts themselves, and explanatory notes, and are set in the context of his life and times by an illuminating introductory chapter. An original analysis of Attar¿s poetic language and thought is also offered. Attar, who lived in Nishapur until his death in 1220, was a complex personality, a brilliant storyteller and poet in both lyric and epic forms, and a creative and original Sufi thinker. His ideas range over the whole spectrum of Persian mysticism and religious philosophy, and his writing paved the way for the triumphs of Rumi and Hafiz. His ideas and exquisite verse deserve a wider circulation than has been accorded them until now, and this book seeks to present his poetry in an attractive way.

Fifty Poems of Attar (Anomaly)

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn

Black River is the autobiography of a nonexistent personage. Drawing on literary techniques developed by Beckett, Burroughs and Borges, Black River plunges into a violent and surreal world from which the last traces of the gods have vanished. The reader will encounter such creatures as mouthers, pokers, the sucking lady, white curls, the loved one, the magistrate, and the ambassador, presented in spare, relentless prose. The text by Justin Clemens is supplemented with Helen Johnson's extraordinary collages. Black River is a work of hallucinatory materialism.

Black River (Anomaly)

Clemens, Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication Justin

Literary

The Concept of Model is the first of Alain Badiou's early books to be translated fully into English. With this publication English readers finally have access to a crucial work by one of the world's greatest living philosophers. Written on the eve of the events of May 1968, The Concept of Model provides a solid mathematical basis for a rationalist materialism. Badiou's concept of model distinguishes itself from both logical positivism and empiricism by introducing a new form of break into the hitherto implicated realms of science and ideology, and establishing a new way to understand their disjunctive relation. Readers coming to Badiou for the first time will be struck by the clarity and force of his presentation, and the key place that The Concept of Model enjoys in the overall development of Badiou's thought will enable readers already familiar with his work to discern the lineaments of his later radical developments. This translation is accompanied by a stunning new interview with Badiou in which he elaborates on the connections between his early and most recent thought. "This book is indispensable for those seeking to understand Alain Badiou's philosophical project, and for anyone interested in investigating real points of contact between the analytic and continental traditions." - Ray Brassier, Middlesex University

The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics (Transmission)

BADIOU, ALAIN

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.

The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics (Anamnesis)

Gillespie, Sam

The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision

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. Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Charles Larmore and Will Kymlicka, the author demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of critical reconstructionism, a philosophical methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices. In the absence of such a methodology liberalism's radically aspiring critics, whether communitarian, feminist, discourse ethicist, post-Marxist or postcolonial, have yet to trace the individualist commitment of liberal theory back to its source in liberal inquiring practices.

The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision (Anamnesis)

Nicolacopoulos, Toula

'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.  This book includes contributions from: H. S. Harris, John W. Burbidge, Paul Redding, Angelica Nuzzo, David Gray Carlson, Simon Lumsden, Karin de Boer, David Rose, Andrew Haas, Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos, Jorge Armando Reyes Escobar, Maria J. Binetti, Wendell Kisner, Paul Ashton and Robert Sinnerbrink.

The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking

The Trip is the story of Odysseus or Oddy who claims he's as old as Arfstraya itself. He's brain-damaged, demented, deluded or just senile. He is an old beer-drinker who has drunk too much grog in his time; he is perpetually down the local pub; indeed, he just about lives there. Or he's been embittered by all the indignities he's suffered as a Greek migrant to Arfstraya or he's telling the truth and he really is one of the Olympian gods, an immortal, a minor deity, a demi- or semi-god who can even remember the dinosaurs. The Trip traverses Australian history, and features some prominent Australian historical personalities on the way.

The Trip: An Odyssey (Anomaly)

Papaellinas, George

Contemporary

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