To hear Giorgio Agamben’s lecture, “What is a Commandment?” at CRMEP, Kingston University, March 28th 2011: Click here Giorgio Agamben is Visiting Professor, Philosophy, University of Paris 8, and is the author of many books including Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (University […]

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard UP, 2009), Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Harvard UP, 2001) and Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Northeastern UP, 1992). […]

    Free audio download of an LGS event held on 2nd March 2011. To hear China Miéville in discussion on The Weird in Fiction and Politics,  click here

One of the ‘pupils’ of the French university and former student of Badiou himself, Tunisian-French philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem describes Badiou’s nostalgia for hierarchy and discipline as a symptomatic position of the ‘radical chic’.
The ultra-leftist discourses of the most quintessential contemporary philosophers of the West, says Badiou’s pupil, are incapable of understanding or commenting on the Arab revolution. It is no random coincidence that Zizek’s audience meets in the comfort of the lecture venues of Europe and the United States rather than in those of Cuba or North Korea.

Free download of Andrew Benjamin’s lecture, ‘Hegel’s Other Woman: The Figure of Niobe in Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art’, presented to the Centre of Modern European Philosophy, 2oth January 2011, at the Art Workers Guild Lecture Hall, Queen Square, London. Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical  Aesthetics at Monash University. Click here: Hegel’sOtherWoman

Three key words have been prominent in these protest movements across national boundaries. They have been translated as ‘people’, ‘street’ and ‘revolution’, which is fine up to a point. But that is not exactly what they mean. They are of course ultimately untranslatable, but the word translated as ‘people’ is ‘shaab’ in Arabic (شعب), which evokes among other things spatial images of labyrinthine entanglement and narrow passages. It is into this labyrinth that the Arabic ‘people’ are taking the world. In becoming aware of these differences that disrupt the roadmap of correspondence and references structuring most of the comments on the mediatised spectacle of the Arab street, we may discover that a different revolutionary path of deferred dreams is being taken.