In this paper I re-evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “measurant.” I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s “body as measurant” (VI 249/297) describes embodied perception as a tuning into and a dis-covering of a world that is never completely in its grasp. I dis-cover in the world objects and other persons, which sweep me away from the centre of the world and which offer me new perceptual dimensions. This relation does not necessarily imply agreement and harmony, but it suggests that all our interactions, even those that are disharmonious and ambiguous, take place in a back-and-forth of response and transformation.

Alain Badiou’s reception in the English-speaking world has centred on his project of a “mathematical ontology” undertaken in Being and Event. Its reception has raised serious concerns about how mathematics could be relevant to concrete situations. Caution must be taken in applying mathematics to concrete situationsand, without making explicit the equivocal senses of “consistency” as it operates in Badiou’s thought, this caution cannot be precisely applied. By examining Being and Event as well as looking backwards at his first philosophical work, The Concept of Model, some key distinctions on the meaning of “consistency” will be clarified.

Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject has consistently opposed a vision of History as meaning and totality, for the sake of an internal, subjective and discontinuous grasp of the periodisation of political “sequences.” This article examines the theoretical trajectory that leads Badiou to dislocate the historical dialectic, generating a comprehension of political time which is no longer bound to an ordered matrix of expression and development; it also considers Badiou’s relation tovarious strands of anti-humanist anti-historicism and tackles the theoretical tensions that inhere in his disjunction of nature and history. The article concludes by discussing the effect of Badiou’s notion of periodisation on the very historicity and mutability of his own philosophical apparatus, and the immanent threat posed to his thinking of the event by an ‘absolute historicism.’

Alain Badiou argues in “Rancière and Apolitics” that Rancière has appropriated his central idea of equality from Badiou’s own work. We argue that Badiou’s characterisation of Rancière’s project is correct, but that his self-characterisation is mistaken. What Badiou’s ontology of events opens out onto is not necessarily equality, but instead universality. Equality is only one form of universality, but there is nothing in Badiou’s thought that prohibits the (multiple) universality he positsfrom being hierarchical. In the end, then, Badiou’s thought moves in a Maoist direction while Rancière’s in an anarchist one.

This article examines Heidegger’s account of existence by proceeding through one of his early accounts of our historical being and then looking at two of his later treatments of our historical being. Throughout his whole work, Heidegger seeks to show that destiny, das Geschick, is the essential constituent of history, die Geschichte. My own argument—--which is intended as an extension and application of Heidegger’s, not merely an exegesis--—is to formulate a still broader concept derived from das Geschick, which I call civilisation. I conclude with the claim that civilisation is a normative principle as well as a descriptive one, and can take on the role of justifying thelaws and institutions of our communities.