Badiou's philosophy of the 'event' has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou might call 'the state of the situation'. After briefly outlining the manner in which Badiou's reinvigoration of the concept of 'truth' constitutes a serious challenge for the politics of difference and the ethics of alterity, this paper explores the significance for educational philosophy of what, borrowing from Jacques Rancière, Badiou calls the 'axiom of equality', or the notion that, in democratic politics, 'equality must be postulated not willed'. I suggest that this axiom is best understood when read in relation to Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and thus explore an intrinsic link between Badiou's more obscure philosophical claims and political assertions on the one hand, and the question of education on the other. I further propose that the limitations of Badiou's criticism of Rancière's work, which suggests that he stops short of locating an effective political subject who might oppose the parliamentary state, are revealed most explicitly when we reassess Rancière's approach to education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in his more recent work on political aesthetics. Ultimately, however, I conclude that a truly democratic approach to education will have to learn from both Badiou and Rancière, and take seriously the 'axiom of equality'.

This chapter focuses primarily on Derrida’s very late seminars on ‘The Beast and the Sovereign’ and ‘The Death Penalty’. It shows how, for Derrida, the problem of the secret is bound up with that of death, which is an issue that concerned Derrida in all of his work.

Georg Simmel’s treatment of the lie – in the essay ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies’, but in other, lesser known texts as well – is an aspect of his thought that has not received a great deal of attention among theorists. And yet many of his better known contributions to social theory – including his concepts of ‘interaction’ and ‘sociation’, his appreciation of the spatial and the aesthetic dimensions of social life, and his speculations about culture and subjectivity in the modern world – draw on ideas that he developed while contemplating the problem of deception. In this article, I bring Simmel’s work on mendacity to the fore, and show how a consideration of it sheds new light on some of his most familiar claims. I further argue that Simmel’s work on the lie illuminates a very old and vexing set of philosophical debates, and especially the debate over self-deception, or whether or not it is possible to lie to oneself. Along with providing a close study of his comments on the lie in ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies’, and in the chapter of his monumental Sociology that is based on that essay, I propose a reading of Simmel’s heretofore ignored fable or fairytale ‘Der Lügenmacher’ – one of the eight short pieces that he published pseudonymously between 1899 and 1903 in the cultural journal Der Jugend under the heading ‘ Momentbilder’ or ‘Snapshots, sub specie aeternitatis’.

We are living in an age of Big Ideas. Not so long ago, a book like The Structure of World History would have seemed impossible. Every word in its titleeven, perhaps, the article and the prepositionwould have aroused instant suspicion. Grand narrative of modernity, we would have said. Necessarily exclusionary in its effort to capture everything. Insensitive to difference. Totalizing. Potentially totalitarian. Now, things appear very different. Universalism is backalthough, this time, it has a slightly different valence, and a slightly different relationship with that other concept that was until recently more or less forbidden, namely truth. In the English-speaking world, Kojin Karatani appeared on the scene in 2003 with the translation of his Transcritique: On Kant and Marxa work in which he argued that a number of the apparent contradictions in Marx's thought (particularly between a deterministic account of history and an activist account of politics) must be conceived of as 'antinomies' in the Kantian sense, and that they can be understood alongside one another, not dialectically or oriented towards an eventual synthesis, but via what Karatani called a 'parallax view' (this being where Žižek derived the title of his book of the same name). If Transcritique was a decidedly philosophical work, The Structure of World History, as the title indicates, is decidedly historical. More accurately, here Karatani seeks to contribute to a Marxist tradition of anthropological historiography, and especially to what Wallerstein calls 'world systems theory'. While, as I will try to suggest in a moment, the details get rather sophisticated and surprising, the overall argument of The Structure of World History can be stated quite directly. To understand human history, Karatani suggests, we must think, not in terms of what Marx called 'modes of production', but in terms of what he calls 'modes of exchange'. Here the word 'exchange' has an expansive meaning, including everything from economic exchange to symbolic exchange in the widest possible sense. Once we make this shift, Karatani proposes, we are no longer stuck with Marx's base/superstructure model. Now things like politics and culture are no longer seen as instruments or epiphenomena of economics. Rather, we can think all

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