Abstract:
Badiou’s teacher Plato argued that philosophy is a business of ‘eros’ (love and desire). In the modern orbit, Freud has told us that love is above all a business of identification. Plato’s ‘Symposium’ agrees that philosophy begins with identification with, and love for, certain beautiful individuals. It then ascends towards the love of the beauty that is in many people towards the idea of beauty itself, via the beauty that exists in laws, literature and philosophy. Yet often enough, as the drunken Alkibiades shows in the ‘Symposium’, love does not make it beyond identification with beloved figures. This is one concern that animated my article, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’. Particularly in the antipodes, fuelled by remnants of a distinct cultural cringe, a culture of mindlessly identifying with the latest figures from the continent persists. Philosophy and ‘theory’ in these cases in truth never transcends philology: deciphering the often cryptic formulations of one or other master. Often, too, on the model of the artistic (as against the political) avant-garde, this philological act stands as substitute for any political engagement. I confess to wanting to be a Socrates to this Alkibiadean tendency, for Socrates famously spurned the great Athenian general and tyrant in the name of philosophy.
Details / PDF:
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