KW Institute for Contemporary Art
The 21st century has not yet begun. Morale provisoire discussion #4
A 'morale provisoire' is a determined attempt to follow a direction, it approaches thinking in terms of guiding principles for the practice. The series morale provisoire is set against the libertarians, liberals, sophists and social chauvinists of our times and intends to bring together guiding interventions for theory and practice.'Jelica Sumic Riha: The 21st century has not yet begun' Broadly, what is at stake is nothing less than examining the possibility of politics in today's world where the collapse of Marxism gives free reign to the only surviving proponent: neo-liberal thought. This paper sets out to answer the question how Badiou's attempt to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in the era of the total hegemony of the capitalo-parliamentarism, for the purposes of combating the contemporary nihilism of a 'politics without politics', constitutes the opening for another thinking of politics, one in which the relationship between eternity and change is constitutive of politics. The second task of this paper is to look at Badiou's notion of a 'moral provisoire' for the worldless times and suggest that this notion which mobilizes the powers of philosophy constitutes a frame of reference for a radical novel conception of history: that of the eternal. Jelica Sumic Riha is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nova Gorica and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Centre in Ljubljana; director of the doctoral programme at the University of Nova Gorica.