[Marxism-Thaxis] Sahlins on Leslie White

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September 21, 2008
Leslie A. White
In the pre-’60s at the University of Michigan, rebellion consisted of
listening gleefully to the anthropologist Leslie White going mano a
mano with God. White was one of those maverick intellectuals and
politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La
Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the
pieties-and powers-that-be. Some of these intellectuals were village
atheists from the beginning. Others, like White, only shook off the
idiocies of rural life when they went to the city and the university.

We never knew White was a member of the Socialist Labor Party in the
’30s and early ’40s, contributing articles to The Weekly People under
the name John Steel. Nor could you have guessed from his
so-Americanized version of Marxism: a theory of cultural evolution
based singularly on technological progress. Progress in the Neolithic,
he claimed, came from the increase in the amount of energy harnessed
per capita because of plant and animal domestication. He was not
amused when I objected that energy “per capita” was the same as in the
Old Stone Age, since the primary mechanical source remained the human
body.

On the other hand, I have never repudiated White’s concept of culture
as a thoroughly symbolic phenomenon. I never tired of repeating his
dictum that no ape can appreciate the difference between holy water
and distilled water — because there is none, chemically speaking.
That, for me, resolved the contradiction in his own teaching and that
of the many human scientists who separate culture from practical
activity, as if the symbolic dimension of economic behavior were an
afterthought of the material. The “economic basis” of society is
culturally constructed. Even our supposedly “rational choices” are
based on another, meaningful logic that, for example, makes steak a
more prestigious food than hamburger, or women’s clothes different in
significant ways from men’s. It turns out that materialism is a form
of idealism, because it’s wrong, too.

Marshall Sahlins is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the
University of Chicago and the author most recently of “The Western
Illusion of Human Nature.”

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Badiou

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Alain Badiou


Alain Badiou French philosophy
Contemporary philosophy

Full name Alain Badiou
Born 17 January 1937 (1937-01-17) (age 72)
Rabat, Morocco
School/tradition Continental philosophy
Main interests Set Theory, Mathematics, Metapolitics, Ontology
Notable ideas Event, truths
Influenced by[show]
Plato, Marx, Cantor, Albert Lautman, Mao Zedong, Lacan, Althusser,
Paul Cohen, Sartre, Deleuze, Hegel, Stéphane Mallarmé, Samuel Beckett,
Fernando Pessoa, Sylvain Lazarus
Influenced[show]
Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, Simon Critchley, Ray Brassier, Sylvain Lazarus
Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent
French philosopher, formerly chair of philosophy at the École Normale
Supérieure (ENS). Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, Badiou
is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental
philosophy. Particularly through a creative appropriation of set
theory from his early interest in mathematics, Badiou seeks to recover
the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that is neither
postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity.

Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Key concepts
2.1 Four discourses
2.2 Inaesthetic
3 Introduction to Being and Event
3.1 Mathematics as ontology
3.2 The event and the subject
4 Works
4.1 Philosophy
4.2 Critical essays
4.3 Literature and drama
4.4 Political essays
4.5 Pamphlets and Serial Publications
4.6 English translations
4.6.1 Books
4.6.2 DVD
5 Lectures
6 Further reading
6.1 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English (Books)
6.1.1 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English (Essays and articles)
6.2 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in French (Books)
7 Notes
8 External links



[edit] Biography
Badiou was trained formally as a philosopher as a student at the École
Normale Supérieure (ENS) from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he
took courses at the Sorbonne. He had a lively and constant interest in
mathematics. He was politically active very early on, and was one of
the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was
particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria.
He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a
study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly
influenced by Jacques Lacan.

The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to
the far Left, and he participated in increasingly radical communist
and Maoist groups, such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of
University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion
of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual
debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François
Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations
from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.

In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis
went into decline (with Lacan dead and Althusser in an asylum), Badiou
published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as
Théorie du sujet (1982), and his magnum opus, Being and Event (1988).
Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and
sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon
in his more recent works.

He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also
associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège
International de Philosophie. He is now a member of "L'Organisation
Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML
in 1985. Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays
such as Ahmed le Subtil.

In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been
translated into English, such as Ethics, Deleuze, Manifesto for
Philosophy, Metapolitics, and Being and Event. Short pieces by Badiou
have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as
Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History
[1] and Parrhesia. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher
his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of
the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and
South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.

Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of
Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of
his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" - The Uses of the Word
"Jew" [2]. This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou
being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with
articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in
the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher
Jean-Claude Milner has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.[1]


[edit] Key concepts
Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his
philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his
categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical cri