'Yes, the century is an ashen sun': poem and subject in the philosophy of Alain Badiou

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

A study of ignorance: suffering and freedom in early Buddhist teachings and parallels in modern neuroscience

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and (3) efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time.

The difference of Being in the early modern world: a relational-material approach to life in Scotland in the period of the witch trials

This thesis investigates how ways of being in different ontologies emerge from material and embodied practice. This general concern is explored through the particular case study of Scotland in the period of the witch trials (the 16th and 17th centuries C.E.). The field of early modern Scottish witchcraft studies has been active and dynamic over the past 15 years but its prioritisation of what people said over what they did leaves a clear gap for a situated and relational approach focusing upon materiality. Such an approach requires a move away from the Cartesian dichotomies of modern ontology to recognise past beliefs as real to those who experienced them, coconstitutive of embodiment and of the material worlds people inhabited. In theory, method and practice, this demands a different way of exploring past worlds to avoid flattening strange data. To this end, the study incorporates narratives and ‘disruptions’ – unique engagements with Contemporary Art which facilitate understanding by enabling the temporary suspension of disbelief. The methodology is iterative, tacking between material and written sources in order to better understand the heterogeneous assemblages of early modern (counter-) witchcraft. Previously separate areas of discourse are (re-)constituted into alternative ontic categories of newly-parallel materials. New interpretations of things, places, bodies and personhoods emerge, raising questions about early modern experiences of the world. Three thematic chapters explore different sets of collaborative agencies as they entwine into new things, co-fabricating a very different world. Moving between witch trial accounts, healing wells, infant burial grounds, animals, discipline artefacts and charms, the boundaries of all prove highly permeable. People, cloth and place bleed into one another through contact; trees and water emerge as powerful agents of magical-place-making; and people and animals meet to become single, hybrid-persons spread over two bodies. Life and death consistently emerge as protracted processes with the capacity to overlap and occur simultaneously in problematic ways. The research presented in this thesis establishes a new way of looking at the nature of Being as experienced by early modern Scots. This provides a foundation for further studies, which can draw in other materials not explored here such as communion wares and metal charms. Comparison with other early modern Western societies may also prove fruitful. Furthermore, the methodology may be suitable for application to other interdisciplinary projects incorporating historical and material evidence.