What does the word materialism mean today? International Symposium on Alain Badiou, Materialism, and Dialectics

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

What does the word materialism mean today? International Symposium on Alain Badiou, Materialism, and Dialectics

Original language description

The last century has seen an extraordinary efflorescence of materialist thinking. Materialism has become the dominant opinion of our times; the debates trying to answer the question what is to be done are now framed within the materialism itself. Alain Badiou, in the preface to Logics of Worlds, opposed materialist dialectics to contemporary doxa of democratic materialism. According to Badiou, democratic materialism is a doctrine sustaining limitations of parliamentary democracies; it is a conviction according to which only bodies and languages exist. Democratic materialism is closely related to biopolitics, to embeddedness of human beings within their environment, to deposition of every language that would pretend to overcome particularity. Postmodernity as such inscribes itself within the regime of democratic materialism. Badiou proposes materialist dialectics as an antithesis of this democratic materialism. Materialist dialectics is a conviction that does not negate the existence of bodies and languages, but adds to them third term: truths. For Badiou, truths are the necessary immaterial and dialectical element of any true materialism of the 21st century. In order to be truly materialist today, one needs to revisit the immaterial element of the materialism itself, its dialectical core. Or as Frank Ruda points out, it is necessary to dialectically reverse the materialism itself, to define materialism as idealism without idealism. What is then a truly materialist position for the 21st century? And what does the signifier 'materialism' mean today? How can be dialectical thinking embodied within different domains of human activity, within architecture, art, or politics? It may be precisely the new understanding of dialectics that could enable us to overcome limitations of the postmodernism.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

M - Conference organization

CEP classification

AA - Philosophy and religion

OECD FORD branch

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Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2016

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Event location

Prague

Event country

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Event starting date

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Event ending date

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Total number of attendees

8

Foreign attendee count

5

Type of event by attendee nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce