Frank Ruda

IDEALISM WITHOUT IDEALISM

Abstract This article examines a contemporary proposal of how to conceive of materialism, more specifically of a materialist dialectics (another name for an immanent materialism). This proposal was formulated by Alain Badiou and it is of huge interest for the contemporary discussion as it inscribes the very historical coordinates in which it was articulated into its own proposal. The article develops this by arguing that Badious materialist dialectic historically situates itself after idealist options seem to have become impossible. However, the very dialectical kernel of this materialism leads Badiou to claim that after the perpetuated struggle between materialism and idealism is declared to have been overcome, the very split separating the two returns in an inverted form inside materialism, splitting it again into two. Thereby the immanent split in materialism leads to two options: either one defends a materialism devoid of any idealist reference or a materialism which seeks to rescue something of idealism. The article concludes by suggesting that only from a detailed reconstruction of the functioning of philosophy in Badious system does it become possible to conceive of the threats that any materialism today faces and to delineate the proposed option of how to avoid them consistently. The article demonstrates how, today, materialism can only be properly materialist (without any metaphysical, mythical foundation) by resurrecting something of idealism, which is why it deserves the name of what I call an “idealism without idealism.”

The event of language as force of life: Agamben's linguistic vitalism

The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we intend to emphasise the systematic nature of Agamben’s project and its insistence on the creation of a supposedly new definition of philosophy as such. Secondly, we mean to show how such an endeavour is first and foremost ontological, not political, and explicitly inscribes itself within the legacy of twentieth-century philosophy’s (especially Heidegger’s) attempt to overcome metaphysics. Thirdly, we seek to problematise the all too often taken-for-granted proximity between Agamben’s ontological politicisation of philosophy and Badiou’s and Žižek’s re-launching of a “communist hypothesis” that is inextricable from a positive re-evaluation of materialism and dialectics. Our central claim is that Agamben’s thought relies on a vitalist ontology that thinks the event of language as the force of life and, consequently, that his – ultimately theological – recuperation and critique of dialectics can only be understood in this framework, that is, outside, if not against, any return to Marx.

Alles verpöbelt sich zusehends! Namenlosigkeit und generische Inklusion

Zusammenfassung Problematisiert die Systemtheorie die Exklusion, so tut sie dies, indem sie von einem Bereich spricht, dem alle Bestimmungen abgehen, in dem sich alle Attribute ausgesetzt finden. Die folgenden Überlegungen lassen sich von dieser Grundannahme leiten, um zunächst zu zeigen, inwiefern Luhmann daraus Argumente generieren kann, die andere mögliche Erklärungsmodelle der Exklusionsmechanismen so verstehen, dass diese ihre Radikalität verharmlosen. Jedoch bedeutet Exklusion als absolute Privation zu denken, wie ich im Folgenden zeige, dass es möglich wird, eine theoretische Linie von Hegel zu Luhmann zu ziehen, die deutlich machen kann, dass beide von einer ihnen gemeinsamen ontologischen ›Grundstellung‹ ausgehen. Aus dieser Diagnose werde ich entwickeln, dass sich in Luhmann ein theoretisches Problem wiederholt, das in der Hegeischen Philosophie mit dem Namen ›Pöbel‹ verbunden ist, um in einem letzten Schritt nachzuweisen, dass die Hegelsche Pöbel-Tragödie und die Luhmannsche Exklusions-Farce den Blick freigeben auf einen Denker, dessen Zeit auch für die Frage nach der Exklusion noch nicht abgegolten ist: auf Karl Marx und dessen frühe Entwürfe zur Subjekt- ›Form‹ des Proletariats.

Introduction: The Absolute Revisited—Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

The concept for this book emerged after the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism.1 The initial aim was to gather a series of responses to the book in the philosophical journal Crisis and Critique2 that we both coedit. We envisaged bringing together scholars who begin from different perspectives to seriously engage with the concept of dialectic in the work of G. W. E Hegel and Jacques Lacan as presented and systematically developed by Žižek in Absolute Recoil. But when we started putting this together, it became clear that the initial idea had to be expanded beyond the frame of a journal issue and required a properly systematic realization in the form of a book.

Dialectical Materialism and the Dangers of Aristotelianism

In 2013, at a conference entitled “The Actuality of the Absolute: Hegel, Our Untimely Contemporary” that took place at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London, Slavoj Žižek presented his paper as the last speaker. He presented some of the arguments that he afterward turned into the argumentative kernel of chapters two and three of his Absolute Recoil. In the discussion following his lecture, someone from the audience raised a critical question that sought to point out a performative contradiction with regard not only to Žižek’s presentation at the conference but rather to his way of thinking altogether. The question that he raised was the following: how can one at the same time claim to defend and resurrect Hegel, the thinker of the system and conceptual consistency, and also jump from speaking about Martin Heidegger to elaborating on Walter Benjamin, from addressing the relation between man and nature (in this case between human beings and the fish in the sea) to the emergence of language and radical historicity, to ultimately also speak about politics of emancipation? In short: how can Žižek defend Hegel, the ultimate thinker of systematicity and conceptual inferences, and at the same time present not only a paper but also a way of thinking that completely lacks (or seems to lack) the very systematicity and consistency he proclaims to defend? Žižek’s respective presentation, but also his thought in general, thereby comes to embody this kind of performative contradiction, opting for one thing and enacting its very opposite.