Event and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead

This book addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the groundless ontological ground of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world-a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity-that is always already still creating. Event and Decision offers the reader a live experience of this evental theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves. And if the mirror you peer into shows you something foreign, something different than what you know as yourself, then this difference makes reading the book easy. The only impossibility is to lose your way.
About the Author: Roland Faber is Kilsby Family / John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. He specializes in poststructuralism (Deleuze) process philosophy and theology (Whitehead). His books include God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (2008) and Secrets of Becoming: Negotiating Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler (with Andrea Stephenson) (2010). Henry Krips is Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. He specializes in Contemporary European Cultural Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Science Studies, especially the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. His publications include Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Cornell University Press, 1999), Der Andere Schauplatz: Psychoanalyse, Kultur, Medien (Turia Kant, Vienna, 2001), Science, Reason and Rhetoric (Pittsburgh University Press, 1995), and The Metaphysics of Quantum Theory (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987). Daniel Pettus is a PhD Student in Philosophy and Ethics at Claremont Graduate University. He specializes in Post-structuralism, Process Philosophy, Mysticism and focuses on the thought of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Whitehead. He is interested in articulating a non-moral / non-ethic that questions and re-fabricates the internal structures of society.