In the opening essay of Conditions (C), “The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself,” French philosopher Alain Badiou claims that today we labor under a post-metaphysical “paralysis” of philosophy for which it appears that “history has entered the— perhaps interminable—era of its closure.” (3) This paralysis and concomitant “malaise” of philosophy aro…[Read more]

There is a question of philology. “Where are you going to?” Socrates asks his lover Phaedrus. “I am going for a walk outside the walls”, he answers. While walking, Phaedrus tells Socrates, a “philological man”, about the conversation about love, the logos erotikos, a language of love and love for language that he had with Lysias. “Plato’s ‘p…[Read more]

I would like to o er you today the beginnings of a meditation on the word yes, on the gesture of affirmation. We should take great care not to con ate affirmation and saying yes – saying it once, twice, or many times over – and in which language? – all too easily. As I will try to elucidate, there is an abyss between saying yes and affirming that…[Read more]

Politics shares with philosophy its attempts at systematization. What in politics is o en lamented as a progressive bureaucratization and obfuscation of revolutionary fervor is presented in philosophy as the maturation of a system, metaphysical, ontological, or otherwise. This slow process of maturation that supposedly takes place throughout a…[Read more]

Formulating a theory of signification doesn’t seem to be one of philosophy’s current preoccupations. Whether suffering from a malaise after the so-called linguistic turn, or placing its hopes on the algorithms of the future to figure out language’s “emergent properties,” the thinking of the sign seems to have lost most of its vigor. Neverthel…[Read more]

This essay investigates a certain disturbance that appears at the moment that philosophy is confronted with philological practices, as foreshadowed in Paul de Man’s seminal work on the ‘return to philology.’ This disturbance appears vividly in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics with the sudden appearance of the ‘nonsense word’ kzomil. Hei…[Read more]

Discussion of the work of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj in relation to the heritage of Albanian socialist realist art.