Author: Ralph Miliband File Type: pdf

Author: Mark Jurdjevic File Type: pdf Like many inhabitants of booming metropolises, Machiavelli alternated between love and hate for his native city. He often wrote scathing remarks about Florentine political myopia, corruption, and servitude, but also wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and confident hope of better times. Despite the alternating tones of sarcasm and despair he used to describe Florentine affairs, Machiavelli provided a stubbornly persistent sense that his city had all the materials and potential necessary for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. As he memorably put it, Florence was truly a great and wretched city.Mark Jurdjevic focuses on the Florentine dimension of Machiavellis political thought, revealing new aspects of his republican convictions. Through The Prince, Discourses, correspondence, and, most substantially, Florentine Histories, Jurdjevic examines Machiavellis political career and relationships to the republic and the Medici. He shows that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavellis political thought were distinctly Florentine in inspiration, content, and purpose. From a new perspective and armed with new arguments, A Great and Wretched City reengages the venerable debate about Machiavellis relationship to Renaissance republicanism. Dispelling the myth that Florentine politics offered Machiavelli only negative lessons, Jurdjevic argues that his contempt for the citys shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of its unrealized political potential.**

Author: Olaf Ihlau File Type: pdf

Author: Alain Badiou File Type: pdf Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badious seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badious year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking.In a highly original and compelling account of Lacans theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the anti-philosopher, a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badious own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badious more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.**ReviewBadious antiphilosophysituated at the antipodes of moral philosophy and launching a challenge to the authority of philosophy as institutional pedagogyturns crucially on the seminar he devoted to Jacques Lacan from 1994 to 1995. Lacan, a rebel with a cause, will stand alongside Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Saint Paul in Badious confraternity of thinkers outside the norm. Hysterical master, ontologist of the matheme, philosopher of conditions (of politics, of desire), apologist of acts that come to being in being said, theorist sans pareil of the real in the real world, of the impasse enabling something rare and extraordinaryeach Lacan in due course proved fundamental to resolving the subject of freedom problem that gripped Badiou in the long aftermath of May 68 and informed his magisterial Being and Event. In this lucidly translated and brilliantly introduced transposition of a teaching-eventthe Badiou-Lacan eventthe participant enters a transfixing world of theory as it happens. Badious seminar, much like Lacans, is something between an art form, a politics of assembly, a Brechtian theater of shake-up, a lesson on indifference in its relation to sexual difference, and a learning curve in classical formalization. Be warned, you are on course to experience philosophy at the break of noon! (Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic) Living philosophy. This is what this auspicious first volume of the seminars of Badiou reads like. Through it we get to hear one of the greatest philosophers of our time grapple with the astonishing ideas of another, one of his own teachers Jacques Lacan. Both exciting and rewarding, it simply cannot be passed up. (Joan Copjec, author of Read My Desire Lacan Against the Historicists) Badiou has always seen Lacan as both a key ally and rival for any contemporary theory of the subject, in particular one that seeks nothing less than to make possible what initially seems impossible. There is no better way to grasp whats at stake in this sympathetic rivalry than to read this engaging and lucid seminar, which is here deftly translated and presented by two of Badious most faithful collaborators. (Peter Hallward, author of Badiou A Subject to Truth) Badious seminar is much more than yet another book on Lacanit is a book with Lacan, a unique experience of the intense dialogue of a great philosopher with another great thinker. It does not render Badious thoughts on Lacanit renders the living process in which we can witness the gestation of deep insights. A book for everyone who wants to see how thinking works. (Slavoj Zizek, author of Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil) In todays theoretical humanities, Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou are by far two of the most important and frequently referenced figures. Along with Slavoj Zizek, Badiou is rightly seen as profoundly shaping contemporary philosophytheory along lines flowing directly out of Lacans teachings. Through a historical narrative running from ancient Greece through the postmodern Western world, Badiou defines philosophy partly through his characterizations of antiphilosophy. Hence, these seminars, including the one on Lacan, are crucial for an adequate appreciation of Badious vision of philosophy tout court. (Adrian Johnston, author of A New German Idealism) About the AuthorAlain Badiou is emeritus professor of philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. His Columbia University Press books include Platos Republic A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters (2015) and Theres No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship Two Lessons on Lacan (with Barbara Cassin, 2017). Kenneth Reinhard is professor of comparative literature and English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Susan Spitzer is a frequent translator of Badious works.