Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works (especially 2006’s Logiques des mondes), Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one” (compter-pour-un). The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through.

Preface to the English-language edition

Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian transcendental idealism

This article uses a sociomaterial perspective to explore how deficit views of young children’s language and literacy are sustained and can be challenged. Foregrounding the notion of multiplicity, it considers how diverse sociomaterial relations work to uphold particular kinds of practice and particular arrangements of bodies and things over others. These relations may interfere with and interface with each other in different ways, sometimes sustaining but also potentially disrupting deficit discourses and practices. Our sociomaterial perspective is illustrated with a short vignette from a study of children and touchscreen tablets in an early years setting. An initial analysis is followed by a series of alternate and tentative tracings of other kinds of relations that play through those moments. The article contributes to debates about social inequality by troubling the certainties generated though deficit models of children’s literacy, whilst working proactively to envision and produce alternate possibilities that foreground the potentialities generated as people and other materials assemble together.

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Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy:

Michelle: "Imagine that you enter a parlor," writes Kenneth Burke. "You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion" {Philosophy 110). With this metaphor, Burke sets the stage for the so-called linguistic turn of late twentieth century thought. This "parlor," Burke suggests, is the rhetorical world in which we find ourselves, debating, conversing, and creating knowledge. The discursive and communal scene is constructed as a parlor, which connotes warmth and solidarity and indeed projects a cozy world of human dialogue (Gane 65). This metaphor has been embraced by many feminist theorists who claim that such a rhetorical style replicates "female ways of speaking" and that the cozy scene mirrors "feminine ways of nurturing" (see Brody; Lamb; Gearhart; Ruddick; and Flynn).1

Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue

Sophiatown has often been presented as a symbol of a vibrant interracial urban culture that was destroyed by the racial segregationist policy of the apartheid regime. In reality, however, there are many ‘Sophiatowns’. By using Pierre Nora's well-known concept of lieux de memoire and the related notion of ‘placemaking’, this article deals with the issue how different people imagine the space and place they live or have lived in, in order to make claims, shape identities and define belonging. Three historical phases are identified in the history of Sophiatown: as unknown place (up to about the 1910s), place of conflict (from the 1910s to 1955), and place of forgetting and nostalgia (the post-1955 period). By underlining the process of remembering and forgetting, of inclusion and exclusion, Nora's concept helps us to question the presuppositions and representations of the existing histories of Sophiatown. Instead of ‘celebrating’ the old Sophiatown or duly presenting the familiar ‘grand narrative’ of its his...

Sophiatown as lieu de mémoire

This article examines the political use of history as construction of traditions, concentrating on the identity building surrounding the National Day commemorating the Revolution of 1956 (2...

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Preface to the English-language edition

Citations

Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian transcendental idealism

Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy:

Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue

Sophiatown as lieu de mémoire

Building on legacy and tradition: commemorations of 1956 in Hungary

Related Papers (1)

5. The Limited Edition