Ebook: The Ethics of Political Resistance: Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze

A new ontology that forms the groundwork for ethical practices of resistance

What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While these questions recur regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to them have often relied on dogmatically held ideals, such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense. In particular, the strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, employs dualities that reduce the complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment.

Chris Henry brings together the work of Althusser, Badiou and Deleuze in order to offer a new idea of political practice He develops a structural ontology that gives rise to non-idealist, non-dogmatic, yet ethical practices of resistance against the return of classical ontological dualities.

Key Features

• Brings together the work of Althusser, Badiou and Deleuze in order to offer a new idea of political practice
• Develops a structural ontology that gives rise to non-idealist, non-dogmatic and yet ethical practices of resistance against the return of classical ontological dualities
• Contributes to the 'ontological turn', problematising tacit assumptions in the literature such as to be/to not be, the unity of the faculties of understanding, and a formal distinction between epistemology and ontology
• Closely reads Badiou's metaphysics and critiques his concepts of two Platonic and one Parmenidean dyads
• Highlights the importance of time in Althusser's work
• Reads Deleuze through unlikely, yet important, encounters with Mill and Althusser