Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.
While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.
This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.
Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.
What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.
What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.
Two additional weaknesses to Badiou
1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.
2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.
Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.
This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.
This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).
Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.
I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.
