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- MA Aesthetics and Art Theory
- MA Modern European Philosophy

MA Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory
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Name


Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy,

BA (Oxford), MA (Yale), PhD (Yale)
p.hallward[at]mdx.ac.uk

Research Interests

Recent and contemporary French Philosophy, especially Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere; contemporary critical theory; political philosophy and contemporary politics; existentialism; theories of globalization; postcolonial theory.

Member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective; contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Texts
Current Projects
  • The Will of the People. The goal of this project is to develop and defend a notion of trans-individual political will, understood as a rational, deliberate, and autonomous capacity for collective self-determination. In addition to canonical philosophical accounts of the will, it will draw in particular on the political works of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel. It will supplement analysis of these ideas with examination of competing notions of the 'will of the people' that emerged through the revolutionary struggles that began in the late eighteenth century, and with critical discussion of the quasi-voluntarist accounts of political agency advanced by more recent thinkers like Gramsci, Lukacs, Sartre and Badiou.
  • Subtractive Philosophy: a wide ranging study of recent French philosophy, with chapters on Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, Badiou, Levinas, Nancy, Henry, Corbin, Jambet, Rosset and Laruelle.
  • Relational Reality: this is a longer term project which will draw on the resources of the dialectical tradition to reformulate relational or transindividual conceptions of the subject, of commitment, and of conflict.
  • ‘Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’analyse and Contemporary French Thought’, AHRC-funded research grant 2006-2009, in collaboration with Christian Kerslake and Ray Brassier. The aim of this project is to produce a detailed presentation and interpretation of the arguments and ideas developed by the contributors to the French journal Cahiers pour l’analyse (1966-1969) and to assess both their contemporary and their current significance, originality and influence.
Recent and Selected Publications

Authored books:

Edited volumes:

  • Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London: Continuum, 2004.

  • The One or the Other? French Philosophy Today . Special issue of Angelaki (no. 8:2, August, 2003).

  • Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [translation with an interview and introduction], London: Verso, 2001.

Chapters in books:

  • ‘What’s the Point: First Notes Towards a Philosophy of Determination’, in Rachel Moffat and Eugene de Klerk, eds., Material Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

  • ‘Jacques Rancière et la théâtrocratie’, in Laurence Cornu et Patrice Vermeren, eds. La philosophie déplacée: Autour de Jacques Rancière. Paris: Éditions Horlieu, 2006.

  • 'Consequences of Abstraction’ in Peter Hallward ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London: Continuum Press, 2004.

  • ‘Badiou et la déliaison absolue,’ in Charles Ramond ed., Badiou: Penser le multiple. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002.

Journal articles:

  • 'Lyonel Trouillot, or the Fictions of Formal Democracy', Small Axe 13:3 (November 2009): 174-185.
  • 'Order and Event', review essay on Alain Badiou, Logiques des Mondes, New Left Review 53, September 2008.

Press:

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