SEOUL · PLATOON KUNSTHALLE hosted an event of philosophy which discusses about the most urgent contemporary social problems with 12 worldclass philosophers including Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Wang Hui. read the review by John R. Eperjesi, associate professor of English, Kyung Hee University in Seoul:

in 2003, two students at Konkuk University in Seoul were arrested for engaging in "enemy-benefitting" activity. evidence of the students' transgression was possession of Karl Marx's Capital, Louis Althusser's For Marx and George Katsiaficas' The Imagination of the New Left.

as Katsiaficas notes in his new book, Asia's Unknown Uprisings, "apparently, the students quoted sections of these books in a pamphlet they wrote and distributed it in a neighborhood slated for demolition."

a little over a decade later, on september 27, 2013, one of Althusser's students, the French philosopher Alain Badiou, delivered the keynote address at a conference in Seoul organized around left philosophy, politics and art entitled, "The Žižek/Badiou Event of Philosophy."

Badiou was joined by the Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Chinese language and literature professor Wang Hui and a number of other Korean and international scholars. the conference took place at PLATOON KUNSTHALLE Seoul, a military bunker/art space located in the plastic heart of Gangnam.

the irony of holding an event on communism and Marxism in Gangnam, the zone of gaudy consumerism made famous by Psy, was lost on no one. this irony was compounded by the fact that Gangnam is only 35 miles away from the DMZ and our Cold War neighbors to the north.

read the entire review on Huffingtonpost.