Jason Barker

rdf:langString Jason Barker

rdf:langString Jason Barker is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy, a film director, screenwriter and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek and others. Most notable for his translation and introductions to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Barker draws on an eclectic range of influences including neoplatonism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. Writing in both the English and French languages, Barker has also contributed to debates in post-Marxism. In an article published in The Guardian in February 2012, Barker criticised the selective interpretation of Karl Marx's writings by economists such as Nouriel Roubini when responding to the global recession. According to Barker, such interpretations water down the revolutionary aspects of Marx's ideas and focus unduly on their reformist tendencies. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of the Marx bicentennial anniversary, Barker argued: "The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not 'philosophy' but 'critique,' or what he described in 1843 as 'the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be'".