Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
I am reading the synopsis of the new book by Alain Badiou, about numbers. I am tempted to buy it. I have never read any Badiou before. What is he all about? Is it worth it? Does he write well?
Alain Badiou
- Thread starter Dillinger4
- Start date
the button
out on the kocker
I like him, but I've only ever read Ethics. revol68 thinks he's shit, if that's any help.
Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
the button
out on the kocker
Plus when I saw him "live," his response to a standing ovation was that dismissive French hand gesture, which is probably another recommendation.
Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
I am liking him more and more!
What was ethics like?
What was ethics like?
the button
out on the kocker
Hmmm..... it was a long time ago but from what I recall, his argument is that the intrusion of ethical into political discourse is both mistaken & dangerous. He cites the emergent dominance of human rights as a key example, and characterises it as the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Bit like Zizek in Ticklish subject in that respect.
Very entertaining, IIRC.
revol doesn't like him because of his emphasis on "the event" as a rupture with everyday existence, which the wee man thinks is crypto-Maoist.
Badiou is a Maoist. Or at least he used to be. Basically his key philosophical innovation is (in Being and Event) to think that the discourse of ontology, of being qua being (ie- being divested of any predicate or ontic quality), is mathematics, specifically set theory. From this axiomatic decision (rooted in his decision of the multiple over the one) his concept of pure being is one of absolute inconsistent multiplicity. Chiefly his philosophy attempts to think how the new (as universalisable truth) can emerge from the stasis of situations. This occurs via the event, a rupture in the usual system which organises or structures a situation, which exposes the pure inconsistency of being qua being. As a result of this subjects emerge, those who pursue with a relentless determination the consequences of the truth which is being constructed. These truth processes occur in distinct fields (which Badiou considers to be science, art, politics, and love).
In Ethics he attacks human rights and all identarian discourses, essentially as aspects of a system which he later defines as "Democratic Materialism"- (basically late capitalist liberal democracy) whose maxim he states as "there are only languages and bodies". Against this he positions, in the subtractive syntax of his favourite poet Mallarmé, "... except that there are truths". Of course his truths, whilst universalisable, are always situational, localised within a given situation. Human rights, he writes in The Century, are the rights of an animal, fit only for domestication, a falsely naturalised man incapable of anything more than being made comfortable. His own notion of the subject (emerging only in the militant processes in fidelity to a truth) is radically opposed to this.
Lately (in the recently published Logics of Worlds) he has been attempting to link his theory of pure being with a logic of appearance (or being there, being in the world so to speak, which is always for him relational and positional). Here he resorts to a slightly different matheme: category theory, and its notion of topos. I'm in the middle of reading this now.
In sum he is undoubtedly the most important living philosopher, the most ambitious in scope since Gilles Deleuze, (indeed in the field of continental philosophy he is Deleuze's chief theoretical competitor) though his work is certainly not unproblematical (largely when it comes to thinking power and relation). His notion of the event has been savaged by certain Marxist critics (ie- by Daniel Bensaid, for how it appears as some kind of miracle, and seems to eliminate history altogether) but this is to ignore the subtleties of his conception, which deploys a curious kind of dialectics (bafflingly termed materialist dialectics, though it has nothing at all to do with dialectical materialism...)
Best starting place is Ethics, a good secondary text encompassing his entire system is Peter Hallward's A Subject to Truth, and his key work is Being and Event though that is a bit of a beast... Stylistically he ranges from sharply written polemics to dazzlingly complicated mathematised ontolologies. He errs on the side of clarity rather than poetry though, which is useful.
In Ethics he attacks human rights and all identarian discourses, essentially as aspects of a system which he later defines as "Democratic Materialism"- (basically late capitalist liberal democracy) whose maxim he states as "there are only languages and bodies". Against this he positions, in the subtractive syntax of his favourite poet Mallarmé, "... except that there are truths". Of course his truths, whilst universalisable, are always situational, localised within a given situation. Human rights, he writes in The Century, are the rights of an animal, fit only for domestication, a falsely naturalised man incapable of anything more than being made comfortable. His own notion of the subject (emerging only in the militant processes in fidelity to a truth) is radically opposed to this.
Lately (in the recently published Logics of Worlds) he has been attempting to link his theory of pure being with a logic of appearance (or being there, being in the world so to speak, which is always for him relational and positional). Here he resorts to a slightly different matheme: category theory, and its notion of topos. I'm in the middle of reading this now.
In sum he is undoubtedly the most important living philosopher, the most ambitious in scope since Gilles Deleuze, (indeed in the field of continental philosophy he is Deleuze's chief theoretical competitor) though his work is certainly not unproblematical (largely when it comes to thinking power and relation). His notion of the event has been savaged by certain Marxist critics (ie- by Daniel Bensaid, for how it appears as some kind of miracle, and seems to eliminate history altogether) but this is to ignore the subtleties of his conception, which deploys a curious kind of dialectics (bafflingly termed materialist dialectics, though it has nothing at all to do with dialectical materialism...)
Best starting place is Ethics, a good secondary text encompassing his entire system is Peter Hallward's A Subject to Truth, and his key work is Being and Event though that is a bit of a beast... Stylistically he ranges from sharply written polemics to dazzlingly complicated mathematised ontolologies. He errs on the side of clarity rather than poetry though, which is useful.
Jonti
what the dormouse said
Not sure I'd have described the fellow's style in those terms myself! Here's the great man in a lecture On the truth-process.
My favourite bit ...
My favourite bit ...
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Have a link or reference for Bensaid on Badiou - interesting, as Bensaid has written extensively on Walter Benjamin whose concept of jeitzeit and every second being the gate through which the messiah might enter seem not a million miles away from the "event" in Badiou's sense?
Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
Excellent! He is now on my 'to-buy' list.
I have read some Badiou, and some secondary articles on him. The one thing everyone seems to know about him is tha maths-is-ontology claim, which seems to me a decent enough starting place, and the event-as-rupture, which I found meaninglessly vague at best.
I suppose my main problem is how the latter is reached from the former. How does one begin with maths-is-ontology, and end up pontificating on some made-up concepts of Events and Truth, not exploring our actual use of those terms but seemingly inventing completely new concepts (whose utility and denotation are far from obvious) and attaching existing words to them?
I suppose my main problem is how the latter is reached from the former. How does one begin with maths-is-ontology, and end up pontificating on some made-up concepts of Events and Truth, not exploring our actual use of those terms but seemingly inventing completely new concepts (whose utility and denotation are far from obvious) and attaching existing words to them?
I didn't know Bensaid was a Benjaminian, interesting... (the essay I am referring to is "Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event" which is in the collection Think Again and is available online here). If you want to know why Bensaid is wrong, I would recommend reading some of Bruno Bosteels' work on Badiou and history. I suspect there is going to be some decent work done on the resemblances between Benjamin's "origin" (an eddy in the stream of becoming as The Origin of German Tragic Drama puts it) and Badiou's concept of the event. However Benjamin's messianism sits somewhat uncomfortably with much of Badiou's philosophy (as it does with Benjamin's own materialism).
Basically mathematical set theory is for Badiou the most minimal way of saying something is. Out of various Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatic set theory ideas he builds up a notion of a situation. A situation is where being, (which in its raw form is unpresentable and inconsistent pure multiplicity, as manifolds of the void, which for Badiou is "the proper name of being") is presented and sometimes represented. To do this (given his initial axiom of being=manifold not one) there must be an operation to unify, or render one or render consistent, being. There is then another operation (which he terms the state of the situation) which acts as a metastructure on this initial operation. This gives the basic description of a structured and consistent situation... the "being" bit of Being and Event. So far so structuralist.
The event is necessary for Badiou to explain how significant change can occur, change that is not reducible to the "encyclopedia" of knowledges already present within a situation (ie- radical revolutionary political changes, or paradigmatic shifts in art or science). What the event does is, for a split second, on the edges of the void, in that part of a situation which counts for nothing (or almost nothing at least) reveal the true nature of inconsistent being. Since this is unpresentable within the situation, all this leaves behind is a trace or implication. The event is not a rupture as we usually think it, but perhaps can be described as a subtraction- a moment where the structuring powers of the situation briefly collapse. Badiou is actually very keen to emphasise subtraction rather than destruction in all of his work. But all this is nothing without the subjective element- that events can create subjects to the truths they render possible. In this regard he resurrects a kind of Sartrean subject (though of a very very strange kind, born only in the after effects of an event, inhuman etc...).
For Badiou event is not a matter of history, and truth not a matter of linguistic construction (or cultural norm). In this regard his theory has nothing to say about our everyday useages of those terms, so the lack of sociological research into them is unsurprising.
What is most interesting of all though is how his pupil, Quentin Meillassoux, is utilising Badiou's notion of the event and numerical materialism in his staggeringly original work in speculative realism. Meillassoux wants to destroy all claims towards post-Kantian subjective correlationism, leading him towards the proclamation of his "principle of facticity" that the only necessary thing is absolute contingency, or "hyper chaos". (Incidentally has anyone here read Meillassoux's After Finitude?)
Jonti
what the dormouse said
I'm loathe to admit it, as you are clearly getting a great deal from reading him, but I find Badiou almost unbearably obscure and self-important. I think he's succeeded in hiding the paucity of his ideas behind a fog of words; that if he could only express himself clearly, we'd see he's not saying that much at all.
I quoted a bit from him above. What truth is he expressing? Can anyone put it into other words, as we can with real philosophical or scientific insights? Or is it forever stuck within the boundaries of its own idiosyncratic dialogue, never contacting the real?
I would not want to say that poetry is not a legitimate way of expressing and conveying ideas. But when I try to read Badiou I have to take his writing as evocative prose, as (mostly bad) poetry rather than as a seriously detailed and structured contribution to rational understanding.
Perhaps he is groping with very difficult ideas, and cannot express himself clearly for that reason. Perhaps. But part of me suspects both he and his disciples would be ripe for the Sokal treatment.
I quoted a bit from him above. What truth is he expressing? Can anyone put it into other words, as we can with real philosophical or scientific insights? Or is it forever stuck within the boundaries of its own idiosyncratic dialogue, never contacting the real?
I would not want to say that poetry is not a legitimate way of expressing and conveying ideas. But when I try to read Badiou I have to take his writing as evocative prose, as (mostly bad) poetry rather than as a seriously detailed and structured contribution to rational understanding.
Perhaps he is groping with very difficult ideas, and cannot express himself clearly for that reason. Perhaps. But part of me suspects both he and his disciples would be ripe for the Sokal treatment.
Its totally fair to read his work as a grand (if impressive) intellectual folly. My tutor (the English language expert on Badiou) puts it as follows: he expends an awful lot of complex thought to explain his way out of a few very simple decisions (which are themselves simplifications). But in order to engage with it you have to, y'know, actually engage (which entails entering the system, of course). I don't find him poetic in the slightest though, well, he has a fine turn of phrase certainly, but in the main his style is diagrammatic, (in comparison to the high-blown imagery of Hegel, or the obscene rush of Deleuze and Guattari, the digressive excesses of Zizek etc) which is appropriate given the mathemes which inform his work at the genetic level. Indeed the clearest explanations of his ideas come in his use of maths, not as a metaphor, but rather as the very grounding for all his thought. His words, if you like, operate to re-present the maths in linguistic form for his readership. But it is the maths which offers the clearest and simplest (and totally poetry free) way to the core of his ideas, which are constructed out of axiomatic set theory and transfinite number theory. Whether the philosophical claims he builds on top of this foundation are accurate or not is another matter, but the core ideas can be expressed without the need for words at all. Badiou himself aims explicitly (in his critique of Hediegger in favour of Plato) to replace the poem with the matheme as the way to access being, (to ground ontology) so your critique seems a bit wide of the mark I think. Sokal and friends were right to lambast twats like Irigary for missapplications and false scientism, but they often forgot that these scientific concepts were being transcoded into a different field. To properly hold philosophers to account (in a way which would be a more productive encounter) would require scientists who were also philosophers I suspect. However, you may be pleased to hear that there is a new movement within (post) continental philosophy, known as speculative realism, which aims to conduct a similar (though more rigorous and serious) procedure. For them at least most philosophers from Kant onwards get it very very wrong indeed... Their aim (grounded in variously Badiou's own numerical materialism, Laruelle's non-philosophy, and Metzinger's neurophilosophy) is towards an entirely in-human understanding of philosophy, capable of withstanding both the assault of the "arche-fossil" and the solar catastrophe... One of the key publications associated with this movement frequently interviews and publishes articles by leading mathematicians, neuroscientists, astrophysicists etc, explicitly exploring in a more stringent fashion the subterranean connections between fields.
The knowledge/truth distinction bit you quoted is pretty easy to explain. In sum, Badiou thinks that the everyday state of the world is reducible to situations (say the situation of UK politics). A situation, in mathematical terms, Badiou claims, is a set, a way to count things according to a particular criteria of inclusion. Within these situations, knowledge exists which whilst capable of manipulation and recombination, (and capable of veracity according to the totality of knowledge within the situation) is in itself not "true". This is because "truth" for Badiou has a peculiar definition, and is never a matter of mere veracity, or of grammatical linguistic construction. Truth, in terms of set theory, is a generic set, assembled by subjects to that truth (militants, scientists, poets, lovers etc), in response to an event. Truth in fact is a gamble, (or as Badiou puts it, a wager) as it is never reducible to the sum of knowledges pre-existent within a given situation. Knowledge therefore is essentially not in a position to be used for change (or perhaps it is, but not change of the kind which Badiou is willing to admit as interesting, significant change- his new book appears to alter this somewhat, though the special role for a truth is maintained). Knowledge is incapable of revolutionary change, (he claims) thought in political or scientific-artistic terms. So in a sense he is attempting to do nothing more than to recuperate, against the tide of post-structuralist thought, language games etc... the position of Truth (with a capital "T"). This is part of what makes him so interesting. A truth is what can transform a situation. The "real" aspect of Badiou is pretty simple, for me anyway, it comes down to a radical re-engagement with what is at stake in "the new", and attempting to shift philosophy out of stasis, out of paralysis, into actively attempting to think how the new occurs. For him at least philosophy itself is merely the place where you can think the compossibility of truths. Philosophy then is not a master narrative, but is itself conditioned by revolutionary politics, formal scientific breakthroughs, artistic avant-gardes etc. And in this regard, Badiou's own philosophy naturally passes this test. Badiou then is a massive "kick up the backside" to a whole field of philosphy (and his influence bears irreducibly strange fruit of its own- not least in its irresistable breaking free of the analytic/continental divide- a move which will become ever stronger with the post-Badiouian thought of the speculative realists, whose ideas will define the future of the field).
The difficulty with Badiou is not really in the understanding, (though elements of his work are extremely difficult). I'm fairly clear on what he means. It is whether the simplifications which underlie his terribly complex formalisations are of any use to me (in terms of my own putative attempts at philosophy)-- is his grand hyper-structuralist edifice actually any more than an intellectual curiosity? For example- he gives no guide as to a modelisation of the workings of capitalism. His theory is simply uninterested in such things (it is entirely calibrated around an abstract set-theoretical definition of pure non-ontic being, and then thinking how change can occur. That is it, basically). As far as I am concerned, in order to think revolution, we must engage with the nature of Capitalism itself, in a way which Badiou is incapable (and explicitly unwilling- economics for him is always a part of the situation- a part of the problem). Whereas my own thought leads me towards economics and the analysis of the processes of Capital in serious depth. Further he has a pretty primitive understanding of the workings of power (ie: pre-Foucauldian) and cannot adequately explain relation, even after he has supplemented his system with topos/category theory.
The knowledge/truth distinction bit you quoted is pretty easy to explain. In sum, Badiou thinks that the everyday state of the world is reducible to situations (say the situation of UK politics). A situation, in mathematical terms, Badiou claims, is a set, a way to count things according to a particular criteria of inclusion. Within these situations, knowledge exists which whilst capable of manipulation and recombination, (and capable of veracity according to the totality of knowledge within the situation) is in itself not "true". This is because "truth" for Badiou has a peculiar definition, and is never a matter of mere veracity, or of grammatical linguistic construction. Truth, in terms of set theory, is a generic set, assembled by subjects to that truth (militants, scientists, poets, lovers etc), in response to an event. Truth in fact is a gamble, (or as Badiou puts it, a wager) as it is never reducible to the sum of knowledges pre-existent within a given situation. Knowledge therefore is essentially not in a position to be used for change (or perhaps it is, but not change of the kind which Badiou is willing to admit as interesting, significant change- his new book appears to alter this somewhat, though the special role for a truth is maintained). Knowledge is incapable of revolutionary change, (he claims) thought in political or scientific-artistic terms. So in a sense he is attempting to do nothing more than to recuperate, against the tide of post-structuralist thought, language games etc... the position of Truth (with a capital "T"). This is part of what makes him so interesting. A truth is what can transform a situation. The "real" aspect of Badiou is pretty simple, for me anyway, it comes down to a radical re-engagement with what is at stake in "the new", and attempting to shift philosophy out of stasis, out of paralysis, into actively attempting to think how the new occurs. For him at least philosophy itself is merely the place where you can think the compossibility of truths. Philosophy then is not a master narrative, but is itself conditioned by revolutionary politics, formal scientific breakthroughs, artistic avant-gardes etc. And in this regard, Badiou's own philosophy naturally passes this test. Badiou then is a massive "kick up the backside" to a whole field of philosphy (and his influence bears irreducibly strange fruit of its own- not least in its irresistable breaking free of the analytic/continental divide- a move which will become ever stronger with the post-Badiouian thought of the speculative realists, whose ideas will define the future of the field).
The difficulty with Badiou is not really in the understanding, (though elements of his work are extremely difficult). I'm fairly clear on what he means. It is whether the simplifications which underlie his terribly complex formalisations are of any use to me (in terms of my own putative attempts at philosophy)-- is his grand hyper-structuralist edifice actually any more than an intellectual curiosity? For example- he gives no guide as to a modelisation of the workings of capitalism. His theory is simply uninterested in such things (it is entirely calibrated around an abstract set-theoretical definition of pure non-ontic being, and then thinking how change can occur. That is it, basically). As far as I am concerned, in order to think revolution, we must engage with the nature of Capitalism itself, in a way which Badiou is incapable (and explicitly unwilling- economics for him is always a part of the situation- a part of the problem). Whereas my own thought leads me towards economics and the analysis of the processes of Capital in serious depth. Further he has a pretty primitive understanding of the workings of power (ie: pre-Foucauldian) and cannot adequately explain relation, even after he has supplemented his system with topos/category theory.
Jonti
what the dormouse said
I was not expecting this 
...
...
I'd be interested to read him trying to use maths as the grounding of his thought. I tend to view all structure (and hence all language and thought) as being, at root, mathematical in nature. I wonder what it is about Badiou's approach that he considers especially favoured by the mathematical foundations of it all.
Yeah, that's the bit that appeals to me. Despite our culture's emphasis on choice, freedom and individual responsibility, there is no philosophical or scientific understanding of how such a thing is possible. There's no attention paid to how the genuinely new can emerge. Rather, there's a contradictory perspective that nothing is new, that the future will seamlessly flow from the present, with no deviation from a course of events that was pre-determined in the initial conditions of the universe. Crazy-making stuff!
Well, quite. This is a welcome antidote the kind of thinking that puts philosophy on the throne to judge and lord it over lived experience.
Change occurs because new information comes into play. This is an analytic truth: only an entirely predictable future can be mapped out from information that exists in the present moment. That's what interests me about Badiou's notion of the event. It recognises that, for there to be freedom, there must be events which are new, events which are unconstrained by the past, events which are genuinely creative because they bring new views, new perspectives, and (although he does not use the word) new information into play.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Thanks for link - and suggestiobs. I must say I find the whole set theory/mathmatical abstraction thing a bit of a turn off. You sometimes wonder whether Badiou's whole thought is just an elaborate ad hoc attempt to justify conclusions that are wilfully scandalous rather than seriously held
Not exactly- he holds them very seriously- but this is a matter of mere psychology, its nice to know, but irrelevant to the integrity of the project itself. He covers his arse by making it plain that his philosophy proceeds by axioms, just like the mathematics, by decisions not intuitions. Hence you can knock it down at any number of stages- why the many over the one? Why does the question of being come down to that anyway? (etc). Broadly speaking I like a lot of what the theory allows (to think the new as radical break, truth as chance, subject as merely a finite section or local configuration of processes of truth etc) but constantly find myself stepping back and thinking that the formalism goes too far, in a way which doesn't necessarily give us too much productively.
Jonti- Truth is not reducible to pre-existing information within the situation (or Badiou thinks as much). This is useful at the moment perhaps as it asserts innovation, absolute and radical in form, over the kind of "shuffling of the deck" of pre-existent forms which constitutes late Capitalism (in politics, art etc, perhaps less so science...). But his model of change- faithful connection/disconnection of situational elements/multiples with the name of the event- is a grotesque simplification. But this process definitely does generate new information, as part of the reconfigured situation which is formed in the generic set.
Jonti- Truth is not reducible to pre-existing information within the situation (or Badiou thinks as much). This is useful at the moment perhaps as it asserts innovation, absolute and radical in form, over the kind of "shuffling of the deck" of pre-existent forms which constitutes late Capitalism (in politics, art etc, perhaps less so science...). But his model of change- faithful connection/disconnection of situational elements/multiples with the name of the event- is a grotesque simplification. But this process definitely does generate new information, as part of the reconfigured situation which is formed in the generic set.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Yes, I didn't express that very weill at all- I didn't just mean that he was frivolous about what he is doing - more, as you say, that the project appears to rest on some failrly key moves that he doesn't really establish rational grounds for making, so they can appear contingently adopted without responsibilitiy for why we are doing so.
He seems to leave no room for the historical-as-such - you have Structure and event(ie. momentary dissolution of Structure) all Structuralist-to-the-Nth degree but no real account for the duration of rational agency in response to concretely developing historical conditions (how Cartesian/Kantian!)- it's all like a secular leap of faith -
an uber-volutuntarism which has as its shadow a highly positivistic notion of our knowledge outside of the Event. It's like making a secular religion out of political fidelity.
I don't think it's altogether coincidental that the criticisms made by people like Adorono and Bensaid of the messianic moment in Benjamin echoe in respons to Badiou (however different those two might otherwise be).
But you've clearly gone into all this in a lot more detail than I have (my knowledge of Badiou is from stuff like the polemical pieces in "Infinite Thought" or "Ethics" rather than a systematic study.
You might know this already, but another helpful piece - by Peter Osborne - can be found here:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/STAFF/Peter%20Osborne-Badiou.pdf
Like Osborne, I'm more than a little sceptical about the attempt to put politics back under the sign of philosophy in an extravagantly traditional (Platonic) sense.
He seems to leave no room for the historical-as-such - you have Structure and event(ie. momentary dissolution of Structure) all Structuralist-to-the-Nth degree but no real account for the duration of rational agency in response to concretely developing historical conditions (how Cartesian/Kantian!)- it's all like a secular leap of faith -
an uber-volutuntarism which has as its shadow a highly positivistic notion of our knowledge outside of the Event. It's like making a secular religion out of political fidelity.
I don't think it's altogether coincidental that the criticisms made by people like Adorono and Bensaid of the messianic moment in Benjamin echoe in respons to Badiou (however different those two might otherwise be).
But you've clearly gone into all this in a lot more detail than I have (my knowledge of Badiou is from stuff like the polemical pieces in "Infinite Thought" or "Ethics" rather than a systematic study.
You might know this already, but another helpful piece - by Peter Osborne - can be found here:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/STAFF/Peter%20Osborne-Badiou.pdf
Like Osborne, I'm more than a little sceptical about the attempt to put politics back under the sign of philosophy in an extravagantly traditional (Platonic) sense.
Osborne is a dyed-in-the-wool Frankfurt school guy, who dismisses Badiou with a sneer (in person too I might add...). That article is amusing, but to claim Badiou is simply a neo-Platonist is inaccurate- he himself admits to the serious Platonic influence on his work, avowedly so. But the originality of the project is not reducible merely to Plato MkII.
Bruno Bosteels has gone into why Badiou does have a notion of history. It is tied up with a kind of strange dialectics, rooted in Hegel's Logic rather than The Phenomenology- of "torsion and scission" rather than sublation/determinate negation. Though Badiou claims that "history does not exist" (in Theorie du Sujet) his system does accord some role to the historical- in terms of the naming of the event (which relies on previous events) and in terms of philosophy as the study of the compossibility of truths (which ends up rendering philosophy itself a kind of history or meta-history perhaps). Plus there is the business of the subjective fidelity to a truth being above all "a discipline of time", which needs further development to be properly understood I think... Ultimately it is a kind of religious devotion, his work on St Paul makes this dimension of fidelity exceptionally clear, which is not unproblematic (the notion of Damascene conversion being very close to the birth of subjectivity which follows an event, subjects to truth being very much apostles...)
The basic moves are not grounded for Badiou, they have no ground as they are the axioms from which he develops the rest of his system. But this is not unusual, he merely foregrounds it in a way which other thinkers do not, but all philosophy rests upon such axiomatic decisions, which are ultimately not refutable as such (or rather perhaps are too easily refutable- its a matter of IF we accept this, then...). So the question, for me at least comes down to what we can do with this or that theory, its strengths and weaknesses, because I am not the kind of person who takes up a philosopher as one might a football team or a religion, then defends them to the death! (though I know many such sorts)
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
That's probably me too- no wonder I often agree
His book on the Politics of Time is a must read.
Will follow this up - never read Bosteels. The emphasis on "naming" is very reminiscent of the early Benjamin.
Am sceptical of the recent fad for St. Paul - born again conversions + dogmatism + voluntarism sounds awfully NeoCon to me
That's probably me too- no wonder I often agree
His book on the Politics of Time is a must read.
Will follow this up - never read Bosteels. The emphasis on "naming" is very reminiscent of the early Benjamin.
Am sceptical of the recent fad for St. Paul - born again conversions + dogmatism + voluntarism sounds awfully NeoCon to me
I'm suspicious of the religious overtones also (but voluntarism is a bit off the mark-- is there really a choice at all for Badiou is an interesting question... given that the subject is created at the point of fidelity to a truth, perhaps not?)
Bosteels is well worth the effort, though he is even more gnomic than Badiou...
Jonti
what the dormouse said
If I've understood things correctly, the answer comes down to "via the truth process". And that in turn means by the creation of new information.
It seems that Badiou's philosophy is consistent with the view that me-as-a-subject is occasioned by the creation of information in my nervous system.
In an interview with Collapse (journal) entitled "Philosophy, Science & Mathematics" he defines science as "the rational theory of those phenomena in the world which do not directly depend upon the conscious activity of man". Biology and cognitive sciences are thought beneath physics (say) because: "their concepts are wholly insufficient [...] they fail completely to present the phenomena concerned in the register of eternal truths." Mathematics then is thought by Badiou to enable a kind of in-human scientific discourse (I think) ... and that the inability of biology or human science to mathematically formalise is a symptom, rooted in the fact that they are conceptually inadequate. Hence Biology has knowledge, indeed he claims it has ammassed "countless instances of knowledge" (which he admits are useful in fields like medicine) but it is not a science. I can understand what he driving at, but I'm not sure how satisfactory the conclusion is, (given that he also seems to correctly accord an evental status to Darwin/discovery of evolution).
The science and love processes are undertheorised really- the latter is barely more than an appropriation of Lacan. In a sense I guess, science for Badiou= maths and physics.
The science and love processes are undertheorised really- the latter is barely more than an appropriation of Lacan. In a sense I guess, science for Badiou= maths and physics.
The subject issue: its not a subject in any folk-psychological fashion. Its a local segment of a truth. The subjects to the truths of art and science are not even vaguely human- being as they are the art itself or the scientific results themselves... Everything else is just animal (the everyday human is a mere animal, for Badiou, I believe). There is a big question remaining over the affective dimension of truth processes though...
Jonti
what the dormouse said
Well, yeah, as Alex B said above, Badiou's talk about the truth process and the event-as-rupture seems hopelessly vague. Or, as I put it, just poetically evocative! And Badiou himself seems uninterested in the fact of subjective consciousness, and how it fits into science and his philosophy. I think that's a shame, as I regard the problem of consciousness as perhaps the most important issue for contemporary natural philosophy. But at least one can see a way that his line of thinking could be consistent with a theory, how his thinking could be extended to tackle the issue. One need only associate consciousness with the creation of information (not necessarily an integrated or organised consciousness) on the one hand; and the creation of information as a hallmark of the truth process on the other.
On that line of thought, many biologists regard evolution as a creative process, one that brings new information into play. It's no exaggeration to say they find the claim by (some? most?) physicists that all the information in the world already existed from the get go, and will never be supplemented by events, as riscible.
Steve Jones, for one, has explicitly confirmed to me that he regards evolution as a process that creates information. That would seem to make it an evental process; there is a rupture with the past as something genuinely new comes into play.
On that line of thought, many biologists regard evolution as a creative process, one that brings new information into play. It's no exaggeration to say they find the claim by (some? most?) physicists that all the information in the world already existed from the get go, and will never be supplemented by events, as riscible.
Steve Jones, for one, has explicitly confirmed to me that he regards evolution as a process that creates information. That would seem to make it an evental process; there is a rupture with the past as something genuinely new comes into play.
