Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies and a founding director of the Centre for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK) and Graduate School at The University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). He served as an academic advisor for Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), and his forthcoming monograph, Communism After Deleuze, is scheduled for publication in 2025. Phone: +82 10 2787 1459
In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consc... more In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso's ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso's method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso's basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today's neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to understand the effects of its mechanism far differently from Mosso's early description. The visual images of the brain do not explain the mind-body relation adequately. William James's and Gilles Deleuze's insight into the said experiment disclose the vantage point of neuroscience. My conclusion is that the effects of the brain cannot be reduced to the scanned images of its mechanism.
In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consc... more In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso's ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso's method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso's basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today's neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to understand the effects of its mechanism far differently from Mosso's early description. The visual images of the brain do not explain the mind-body relation adequately. William James's and Gilles Deleuze's insight into the said experiment disclose the vantage point of neuroscience. My conclusion is that the effects of the brain cannot be reduced to the scanned images of its mechanism.
This essay aims to discuss the "machinic enslavement" of capitalism across the globe through the ... more This essay aims to discuss the "machinic enslavement" of capitalism across the globe through the illustrative example of a Korean boy band (BTS). I argue that the rise of the BTS fandom is a cultural repercussion of depthless commodification in connection with the political logic of nationalism against the capitalist nihilism. Endorsing the concept of interpassivity, my argument will suggest that the interpassivity of fandom reveals the "depthlessness" of global capitalism against nationalism. The fans do not want to act as subjects but as delegates of their desire. What they desire is not the fulfilment of their wanting but the ongoing state of desiring as such. They are not interested in the object of the desire but the craving deference of the pleasure for the desire, for they must stop desiring if they can easily own the object. Therefore, BTS is not only a cultural commodity but also an intangible object beyond the pleasure principle.
The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss th... more The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss the function of an artwork in the capitalist society. The perspective of mimesis crucially leads Adorno to the way in which he considers Enlightenment as a paradoxical process of civilization itself, a process precipitating intellectual regression. For Adorno, the Enlightenment project increasingly destroys the sensuous mimetic faculty, while fortifying reification and instrumental reason; however, Adorno finds the remnants of the preserved sensuous mimesis in art; art is a mutated mimesis through the modern rationalization process, by which rationality is combined with the sensuous mimetic faculty. In this respect, Adorno argues that art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. Here, Adorno chooses a different path from Benjamin, who conceptualizes the autonomy of artworks as a magical aura. It is interesting that Adorno specifically points out the paradoxical character of art by which the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. When considering that modern subjectivity is closely related to the Cartesian cogito, what Adorno implies in his analysis is that art is a rational device to disavow magical practices the mimesis of art is possible by its rational feature. More importantly still, the paradoxical mimetic faculty of art leads to irrationality by means of its rationality, in the sense that all rationality aims at necessarily achieving something irrational.
As a prolegomena to writing a critique of contemporary capitalism which takes into account its se... more As a prolegomena to writing a critique of contemporary capitalism which takes into account its semiotic, affective dimensions and which emphasises the notion of hyper-capitalism with Asian characteristics, and in considering the nature of the floating, heterogeneous population of the lumpenproletariat in the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century, the authors believe they remain faithful to Marx and the 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Bringing a unique perspective to the debate and raising pressing issues regarding the exploitation of the lumpenproletariat, we are not content to merely revisit the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Marx's writings such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) but to apply this concept to the contemporary conditions of capitalism and especially to the loci of the precariat in Asia. Our goal is to begin to account for the changing demographic of labour flows, the precarity of life, the modern day slavery which takes place in our time. In examining the passage from the lumpenproletariat, hitherto defined as "non-class" or "people without a definite trace", to lumpen-precariat, defined as people not seen in Asian economies (refugees, the illegally employed, illegal migrants, nationless foreign labour, the withdrawn clan, sex industry workers, night workers; those behind walls, gated communities, and other entrance-exit barriers), this paper discloses not only the subsistence of those in the non-places of the world-in the technocratic-commercial archipelago of urban technopoles-but also and, arguably more importantly, on the Outside, namely the rest of the planet, the other six-sevenths of humanity. This paper looks for "a" missing people, "a" singular, people yet to come, those exiled, excluded and unseen-sited on the edges of respectable society.
Revista Internacional de Filosofía Hodós (Ὁδός), 2021
In this essay, I will argue the relationship between Foucault's concept of political spirituality... more In this essay, I will argue the relationship between Foucault's concept of political spirituality and the Iranian Revolution. Regarding Foucault's concept of political spirituality‖, what must be stressed is that spirituality is combined with politics. For him, spirituality is a desire to liberate the body from the prison of the soul. He regarded spirituality as nothing to do with a religious doctrine, while he did not reject that Shi'i Islam was the source of political spirituality. Therefore, it would be necessary to ask what kind of politics can be realized through spiritual practice. I contend that this question is about the rationale of Foucault's intervention into the Iranian Revolution. Unlike mischievous Western propaganda, the establishment of theocracy was a realistic solution to the limit of liberal democracy. The disjunctive dualism of political Islamism, affirming a difference between the representative democracy and God's decision, suggests an alternative to Schmitt's answer to the question concerning liberal democracy. I argue that God is nothing else than the void of sovereign power, prohibiting any human tyrant who would occupy the place of absolute authority. Only divine violence can be possessing the authority to suspend the legal system and declare a state of exception. Foucault's concept of political spirituality should be grasped with this concept of political Islamism to solve the problem of liberalism.
In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the... more In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the relationship between nation-states and globalization. Today’s aspect of global mobility lies with the logistics of people and goods within and beyond the national governmentality. These logistics flows construct the supply chain locally and globally with infrastructures, people, goods, and information. What must be stressed here is the new role of nation-states in the rise of globalizing logistics. Following the neoliberal model, each nation-state takes on a crucial role in creating markets. In this situation, the dialectics of tourists and the multitude is noteworthy. While the multitude does not belong to the nation-states any longer, tourists as consumers are entrapped to the category of the labor force, i.e., the commodification of labor power. If people want to move from one nation-state to another nation-state, they have to choose whether to be a labor commodity or a consumer. The working class is the moveable population and portable labor force, yet they are legally obliged to stay within a specific territory. It is not labor force but money or a commodity that is permitted to travel around. Although a commodity can be exchanged with money, they are not the same. The monetary circulation brings out the capitalist mobility of production, whereas a commodity completes its final function when it is consumed. In other words, consumption means the withdrawal of a commodity from the circulation. When a commodity is consumed, its function is done, its form finally annihilates, and then money moves from one territory to another in search of different commodities. Global mobility is fueled by the monetary flow, the financial flux in a global scope; nevertheless, its real excursion cannot be withdrawn from the political economy of the Urstaat. I contend that this double-binding relationship is the political deadlock of the Empire and the nation-states.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For De... more The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This 'transcendental exercise' of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left.
In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses dece... more In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily , this experimental piece written from different philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler 'cinema-theory', we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializ-ing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only intact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism.
Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which... more Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England and Korea and use a plethora of philosophical concepts – European and Asian – to make sense of the youthful act of speaking truth to power.
In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consc... more In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso's ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso's method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso's basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today's neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to understand the effects of its mechanism far differently from Mosso's early description. The visual images of the brain do not explain the mind-body relation adequately. William James's and Gilles Deleuze's insight into the said experiment disclose the vantage point of neuroscience. My conclusion is that the effects of the brain cannot be reduced to the scanned images of its mechanism.
In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consc... more In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso's ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso's method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso's basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today's neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to understand the effects of its mechanism far differently from Mosso's early description. The visual images of the brain do not explain the mind-body relation adequately. William James's and Gilles Deleuze's insight into the said experiment disclose the vantage point of neuroscience. My conclusion is that the effects of the brain cannot be reduced to the scanned images of its mechanism.
This essay aims to discuss the "machinic enslavement" of capitalism across the globe through the ... more This essay aims to discuss the "machinic enslavement" of capitalism across the globe through the illustrative example of a Korean boy band (BTS). I argue that the rise of the BTS fandom is a cultural repercussion of depthless commodification in connection with the political logic of nationalism against the capitalist nihilism. Endorsing the concept of interpassivity, my argument will suggest that the interpassivity of fandom reveals the "depthlessness" of global capitalism against nationalism. The fans do not want to act as subjects but as delegates of their desire. What they desire is not the fulfilment of their wanting but the ongoing state of desiring as such. They are not interested in the object of the desire but the craving deference of the pleasure for the desire, for they must stop desiring if they can easily own the object. Therefore, BTS is not only a cultural commodity but also an intangible object beyond the pleasure principle.
The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss th... more The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss the function of an artwork in the capitalist society. The perspective of mimesis crucially leads Adorno to the way in which he considers Enlightenment as a paradoxical process of civilization itself, a process precipitating intellectual regression. For Adorno, the Enlightenment project increasingly destroys the sensuous mimetic faculty, while fortifying reification and instrumental reason; however, Adorno finds the remnants of the preserved sensuous mimesis in art; art is a mutated mimesis through the modern rationalization process, by which rationality is combined with the sensuous mimetic faculty. In this respect, Adorno argues that art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. Here, Adorno chooses a different path from Benjamin, who conceptualizes the autonomy of artworks as a magical aura. It is interesting that Adorno specifically points out the paradoxical character of art by which the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. When considering that modern subjectivity is closely related to the Cartesian cogito, what Adorno implies in his analysis is that art is a rational device to disavow magical practices the mimesis of art is possible by its rational feature. More importantly still, the paradoxical mimetic faculty of art leads to irrationality by means of its rationality, in the sense that all rationality aims at necessarily achieving something irrational.
As a prolegomena to writing a critique of contemporary capitalism which takes into account its se... more As a prolegomena to writing a critique of contemporary capitalism which takes into account its semiotic, affective dimensions and which emphasises the notion of hyper-capitalism with Asian characteristics, and in considering the nature of the floating, heterogeneous population of the lumpenproletariat in the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century, the authors believe they remain faithful to Marx and the 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Bringing a unique perspective to the debate and raising pressing issues regarding the exploitation of the lumpenproletariat, we are not content to merely revisit the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Marx's writings such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) but to apply this concept to the contemporary conditions of capitalism and especially to the loci of the precariat in Asia. Our goal is to begin to account for the changing demographic of labour flows, the precarity of life, the modern day slavery which takes place in our time. In examining the passage from the lumpenproletariat, hitherto defined as "non-class" or "people without a definite trace", to lumpen-precariat, defined as people not seen in Asian economies (refugees, the illegally employed, illegal migrants, nationless foreign labour, the withdrawn clan, sex industry workers, night workers; those behind walls, gated communities, and other entrance-exit barriers), this paper discloses not only the subsistence of those in the non-places of the world-in the technocratic-commercial archipelago of urban technopoles-but also and, arguably more importantly, on the Outside, namely the rest of the planet, the other six-sevenths of humanity. This paper looks for "a" missing people, "a" singular, people yet to come, those exiled, excluded and unseen-sited on the edges of respectable society.
Revista Internacional de Filosofía Hodós (Ὁδός), 2021
In this essay, I will argue the relationship between Foucault's concept of political spirituality... more In this essay, I will argue the relationship between Foucault's concept of political spirituality and the Iranian Revolution. Regarding Foucault's concept of political spirituality‖, what must be stressed is that spirituality is combined with politics. For him, spirituality is a desire to liberate the body from the prison of the soul. He regarded spirituality as nothing to do with a religious doctrine, while he did not reject that Shi'i Islam was the source of political spirituality. Therefore, it would be necessary to ask what kind of politics can be realized through spiritual practice. I contend that this question is about the rationale of Foucault's intervention into the Iranian Revolution. Unlike mischievous Western propaganda, the establishment of theocracy was a realistic solution to the limit of liberal democracy. The disjunctive dualism of political Islamism, affirming a difference between the representative democracy and God's decision, suggests an alternative to Schmitt's answer to the question concerning liberal democracy. I argue that God is nothing else than the void of sovereign power, prohibiting any human tyrant who would occupy the place of absolute authority. Only divine violence can be possessing the authority to suspend the legal system and declare a state of exception. Foucault's concept of political spirituality should be grasped with this concept of political Islamism to solve the problem of liberalism.
In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the... more In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the relationship between nation-states and globalization. Today’s aspect of global mobility lies with the logistics of people and goods within and beyond the national governmentality. These logistics flows construct the supply chain locally and globally with infrastructures, people, goods, and information. What must be stressed here is the new role of nation-states in the rise of globalizing logistics. Following the neoliberal model, each nation-state takes on a crucial role in creating markets. In this situation, the dialectics of tourists and the multitude is noteworthy. While the multitude does not belong to the nation-states any longer, tourists as consumers are entrapped to the category of the labor force, i.e., the commodification of labor power. If people want to move from one nation-state to another nation-state, they have to choose whether to be a labor commodity or a consumer. The working class is the moveable population and portable labor force, yet they are legally obliged to stay within a specific territory. It is not labor force but money or a commodity that is permitted to travel around. Although a commodity can be exchanged with money, they are not the same. The monetary circulation brings out the capitalist mobility of production, whereas a commodity completes its final function when it is consumed. In other words, consumption means the withdrawal of a commodity from the circulation. When a commodity is consumed, its function is done, its form finally annihilates, and then money moves from one territory to another in search of different commodities. Global mobility is fueled by the monetary flow, the financial flux in a global scope; nevertheless, its real excursion cannot be withdrawn from the political economy of the Urstaat. I contend that this double-binding relationship is the political deadlock of the Empire and the nation-states.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For De... more The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This 'transcendental exercise' of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left.
In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses dece... more In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily , this experimental piece written from different philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler 'cinema-theory', we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializ-ing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only intact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism.
Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which... more Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England and Korea and use a plethora of philosophical concepts – European and Asian – to make sense of the youthful act of speaking truth to power.
Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reori... more Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain?
With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.
This volume brings together scholars based predominantly in Asia to contribute provocative and ex... more This volume brings together scholars based predominantly in Asia to contribute provocative and experimental essays on the dynamic relationship between animation and philosophy. In an inventive and playful philosophical way, they address not only the mainstay of Japanese animation, but also Korean film, picture books and Mickey Mouse to understand what we might call film\-philosophy in Asia. In thinking animation with concepts from the technicolour philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, Stiegler, Benjamin, Kristeva and Heidegger, the book sees animation not as a representation of a philosophical idea per se, but conceptualizes it as a philosophical thinking\-device. In the images themselves, what is at work is not just the thinking of a particular director or manga artist, but, rather, thinking as such, through and by the images themselves. The scholars in this collection are committed to thinking images themselves as thought\-experiments and thinking machines.
The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary ... more The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s? In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions—the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and “militant democracy,” long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.
This book is a collection of speeches and interventions that were presented at the Idea of Commun... more This book is a collection of speeches and interventions that were presented at the Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul, 24 September–2 October 2013. The pursuit of communism has a long history throughout the Asian region. For countries like North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, the passage to a form of ‘modernity’ is even unthinkable without this history. The struggle between communism and anti-communism still defines the region’s politics. The anti-communism once employed during the Cold War era, especially in South Korea, has not yet faded away, and is still used for attacking the left in many Asian countries. In this sense, Asia is a lively location for discussing the idea of communism from a non-Western perspective and evaluating whether the idea is universal; or, instead, whether it is to be defined by its regional situation, or by its historical or temporal moment or movement(s). The idea of communism, as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek conceive it, involves the global struggle towards absolute equality. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was chosen as the conference venue because here the idea of communism is once again in the air, reinsinuating the excluded passion for the real into the struggle for independence, justice and rights, into the seamless reality of global capitalism. The Korean peninsula is divided into two regimes, the North being an ‘actually existing’ communist country and the South, on the contrary, a highly developed capitalist country. But a conference such as this could never take place in the North, any more than in China. How should we read this apparent paradox? Here, in summary form, we have the history of communism’s development: the negation of communism = anti-communism, and then the liberal negation of anti-communism (negation of the negation) = anti-anti-communism. But what of communism itself? As the authors in this collection all agree, today one should face up squarely to the legacy of anticommunism, and also to its future, and to the political and intellectual oppression of the idea of communism. Crucially, however, the alternative to such oppression is nothing so negative as anti-anti-communism in the Asian context. The contributors to this volume intervene on many issues relating to the reassessment or reaffirmation of the idea of communism in light of the various political experiments found across Asia and elsewhere.
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The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain?
With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.
The pursuit of communism has a long history throughout the Asian region.
For countries like North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, the passage to a form of ‘modernity’ is even unthinkable without this history.
The struggle between communism and anti-communism still defines the region’s politics. The anti-communism once employed during the Cold War era, especially in South Korea, has not yet faded away, and is still used for attacking the left in many Asian countries. In this sense, Asia is a lively location for discussing the idea of communism from a non-Western perspective and evaluating whether the idea is universal; or, instead, whether it is to be defined by its regional situation, or by its historical or temporal moment or movement(s). The idea of communism, as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek conceive it, involves the global struggle towards absolute equality. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was chosen as the conference venue because here the idea of communism is once again in the air, reinsinuating the excluded passion for the real into the struggle for independence, justice and rights, into the seamless reality of global capitalism. The Korean peninsula is divided into two regimes, the North being an ‘actually existing’ communist country and the South, on the contrary, a highly developed capitalist country. But a conference such as this could never take place in the North, any more than in China. How should we read this apparent paradox? Here, in summary form, we have the history of communism’s development: the negation of communism = anti-communism, and then the liberal negation of anti-communism (negation of the negation) = anti-anti-communism. But what of communism itself? As the authors in this collection all agree, today one should face up squarely to the legacy of anticommunism, and also to its future, and to the political and intellectual oppression of the idea of communism. Crucially, however, the alternative to such oppression is nothing so negative as anti-anti-communism in the Asian context. The contributors to this volume intervene on many issues relating to the reassessment or reaffirmation of the idea of communism in light of the various political experiments found across Asia and elsewhere.