Researcher Theory / CLiC
01.01.05 – 31.12.05
At the Jan van Eyck, Oliver Feltham will research the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary theories of ideology in terms of the nexus between the subject, substance and change. The basic proposition is that when contemporary philosophers theorize ideology, their efforts are determined by a conceptual matrix which articulates a subject with some form of substance and a form of movement. The matrix itself was originally consolidated in Aristotle’s Physics, and a small number of well-known variations have historically ensued such as the Hegelian reworking, Marx’s materialist version thereof, and the Heraclitean-Bergsonian-Deleuzean variation. The hypothesis guiding the research project is that contemporary philosophy attempts to generate new articulations of the subject, movement, and substance; yet, due to the power of the matrix, it often unconsciously repeats ancient articulations in new guises. The goal is to make these repetitions explicit in order to identify their limits and then set out the requirements for a genuinely modern articulation of substance, subjectivity and change so as to theorize both ideology and its obverse, praxis, or, the work of change.
Oliver Feltham has a PhD in philosophy (Deakin University, Melbourne, 2000) and has recently completed his translation of Alain Badiou’s L’être et événement for Continuum Books. He currently lectures in the Comparative Literature Department at the American University of Paris, and teaches theatre and literature at Ecole Massillon. He has published on Lacanian psychoanalysis with a focus on its relation to philosophy, on the implications of Lacan’s discourse theory for the critique of institutions, and on Lacan’s diverse theories of structural change. He has also translated and edited, in collaboration with Justin Clemens, a collection of Alain Badiou’s essays, Infinite Thought, and, in collaboration with Bruno Besana, he is currently editing a collection of essays - De l’ontologie à la politique - on Badiou’s work for the French publisher Harmattan.