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"The oeuvre of Alain Badiou has gained international success and recognition, but most of the secondary literature focuses on internal problems of Badiou's philosophy, rather than its position within a broader philosophical genealogy. This book unites philosophers from Germany, Slovenia, the UK, Australia and France, to trace the relation between elements of Badiou's philosophy and the German philosophical tradition, namely the three significant movements of German Idealism, Phenomenology, Marxism and the Frankfurt School. This is a discussion that has not yet been established, although the parallels and decisive differences between poststructuralist French philosophy and German philosophy are apparent. Through these paradigms - Badiou's reception of German Idealism, Marxism, Adorno and the Critical Theory, and Heideggerian phenomenology - the authors shed light onto Badiou's inheritance of and engagement with these specific traditions, but also highlight the links between these philosophies to open up new questions for contemporary continental thought. With an original chapter from Alain Badiou himself, looking back at his influences and antagonisms within the German tradition, this book is essential for readers interested in the exploration of Badiou's legacy. It illustrates the continuation of poststructuralist philosophy, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, assessing the place of classic continental philosophy to tackle how we might benefit from these intellectual exchanges today."--Bloomsbury Publishing

The article proposes to reconsider the late Heidegger's examination of the concept of the world, as for Heidegger the eradication of all life on planet earth is not the most horrible thing that could happen. It is the impossibility of thinking the world that exposes us to something worse: the loss of our link with being. Following Heidegger, to think the world is not only necessary to prevent the extinction of life on earth, but, moreover, the loss of thinking the world lies at the beginning of the crisis we are living through.

The article reads the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit as the unfolding of the first circle in the development of spirit. It starts with a deception, as we become aware of the impossibility of reading the text along the lines of a regular understanding of regular meanings: instead, the speculative presentation needs to be written while reading. Philosophy takes place in this actualisation of the speculative, and Hegel appears within the text not as its author, but as the site of the speculative, in which he disappears at the same time. This first circle creates a model for the development of spirit in which the theological form of the kenosis is actualised. Spirit empties itself and actualises itself as externalised, directing us beyond Hegel's text to other texts, only to find its actual presentation in other places.

Hegel remarked that 'philosophy is its own time captured in thought'. Philosophy thus relates to the world by taking it as the condition for its own operation, whose aim is to develop the rationality of the real. The theme of conditions emerging in recent thought maintains Hegel's idea, but reverses its direction. Philosophy stands under the injunction of its temporal horizon, not anymore to seize the rationality of its whole, but to capture singular excesses emerging in it. The present confronts philosophy not with the necessity to confirm its maturity, but with the difficult task of capturing nascent novelties, which emerge as radical exceptions to the given state of affairs. Within the framework of a one-day workshop, we will explore with our invited guests the contemporary problem of conditions, by examining ways in which philosophy encounters revolutionary political actions, psychoanalytic practice and inventions in the fields of the sciences, as irreducible fields which reorient its own activity. ; Philosophy Under Condition , workshop, ICI Berlin, 10 July 2010