Being and Event by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It’s often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don’t really “explain” in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is “illegal” because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.
In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself — in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is “made for us” by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn’t at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said
I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).
I don’t find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:
A philosophy worthy of the name–the name which began with Paramenides–is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).
And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou’s own allegiance to a very tradition topography!
I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou’s terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it’s difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it’s nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.
I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn’t simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier–but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition… that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.
Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won’t go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it’s not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He’s started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he’s hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there’s no reason not to.
In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.
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