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The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj's sound piece "Starry Night". Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs, the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified: the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence, and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj's subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou's elaboration of the concept of the subject as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.
By focusing on Pasolini's uncompleted film project "San Paolo", Luca Di Blasi's article 'One Divided by Another: Split and Conversion in Pasolini's "San Paolo"' analyzes the notion of split (the split in the structure of time and, above all, the split of the figure of Paul) and concentrates especially on the very moment of Paul's Damascene conversion. Di Blasi refers to the "Kippbild" as a model that can be used to understand better certain ambivalences in Pasolini's Paul. Locating Pasolini's reading of the founder of the Church in a triangulation with two major contemporary philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, Di Blasi shows that two opposing possibilities of interpreting Paul - as militant subject of a universal event and its necessary consequences (Badiou) and as representative of softness, weakness, poverty, "homo sacer" (Agamben) - fit perfectly with the two aspects of Pasolini's Paul. Pasolini's profoundly split Paul thus represents a dichotomy which disunites two major figures of contemporary leftist thought.
Bruno Besana's article 'Badiou's Pasolini: The Problem of Subtractive Universalism' also deals with Pasolini's script about Saint Paul, but from the perspective of Alain Badiou's theoretical essay "Saint Paul and the Foundation of Universalism" and of Badiou's different thoughts on Pasolini, on the logic of emergence of novelty, and on its thwarted relation with universalism. Two main points appear in Besana's comparative reading. First, the idea that radical novelty or change can only be built in a 'subtractive manner', i.e. via the appearance of something that, by its sole presence, erodes the consistency upon which the present is structured. This is developed through Pasolini's ideas of 'inactuality' and 'forza del passato' and by Badiou's concept of 'event'. Second, a fundamental paradox inherent to the logic of change: change is only possible if it is organized in a set of coherent consequences, but the organized mode (for instance, the party) of such consequences inevitably reduces change to a constant compromise with the present.
Das Zentrum und den Ausgangspunkt von Katja Diefenbachs Beitrag "'Conatus' versus 'cogito'" bildet, wie der Untertitel anzeigt, "der Streit um Spinozas spekulativen Materialismus in der postmarxistischen Philosophie". Sie stellt die kritischen Positionen Badious und Žižeks vor und diskutiert die unterschiedlichen Anknüpfungen an Spinoza in der postmarxistischen Philosophie bei Negri und Agamben, macht aber zugleich deutlich, dass sich ihre eigene Auslegung der Philosophie von Spinoza und des Conatusprinzips an Deleuze orientiert. So geht sie mit Deleuze davon aus, dass Spinoza das Sein als unendliche Potentialitätsdifferenz begreift, in dem der Mensch nichts anderes ist als "Handelnd-Werden, Vermögend-Werden, Verursachend-Werden, das eine Reihe kritischer Wendepunkte umfasst." Sie betont, dass die Struktur des Conatusprinzips anarchisch und nichtvorschreibend ist und genau deswegen einen Primat der Politik begründe, in dem es nicht um den Sprung in die Freuden des Denkens gehe, sondern um die Ungarantiertheit dieses Sprungs.