Saturday, February 18, 2006
(8:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Being and Event Reading Group: The First Meeting (1-59).
My hope for these weekly responses and discussion is that they will not merely be a mere repeating of Badiou's words. Surely we must learn to understand his vocabulary (and that of set theory), but I'm not going to shoulder the burden of re-presenting what it is we already read for the week and cannot hope to express it all. This is in the hopes of keeping this as informal as possible allowing Badiou's own pedagogy to stand or fall on its own with each individual reader, since there is no real instructor in this group (though surely Jared comes close, but I wouldn't want to demand the time neccesary from anyone).To begin, I must voice a complaint concerning the department politics of Badiou's rise in popularity. It seems that every book I've read by Badiou mentions that his thought reflects "philosophical rigour" and that "unlike many contemporary Continental philosophers, Badiou [...] writes lucidly and cogently making his work accessible and engaging." OK, we get it, he's not Derrida! He's not Guattari! Fuck, he's not Alliez (who, surely, is kind of an insane constructer of sentences)! It's really insulting that this has to be mentioned every time and concedes too much room to those who dismiss other French thinkers simply because, at first glance, their writing is difficult. Can we please stop bleating on and on about how clear his work is? For some of us, like me, mathematics is anything but clear. It's beyond mystical and will likely remain so.
Now to my own meager response to the section:
Badiou is very good at getting us to be more rigorous in what our words refer to. We are warned not to confuse ontology with being itself, for ontology is the presentation of presentation (7). So his controversial thesis that ontology is mathematics should not be taken to mean that being is reducible to mathematics, but that mathematics (specifically set theory) determines what is expressible of being qua being (8).
What is interesting to me here is the way that mathematics appears as a quasi-phenomenology. Certainly not in a Heideggerian mode, but Husserlian. I can’t go into a complete analysis of this here, but if you accept that mathematics is merely that which determines what is expressible of being qua being (and thus, does not speak for being itself) then you have something like a Husserlian noumenal and phenomenal that are not separated from one another as in Kant. So the question that immediately comes to mind is, what does Badiou’s system offer to thinking that phenomenology hasn’t already, in some form, offered? I hope to translate a bit from Alliez’s book later in the reading group (that should be embarrassing) where he basically says that Badiou and Deleuze are the two options after the end of phenomenology. At this point, however, I remain unconvinced that Badiou, for all the protestation he would surely have with such a charge, is not creating a phenomenology that replaces experience with mathematics (but isn’t that an experience, even if it is a consistent experience?).
My next point has to deal with Badiou’s hinging everything upon an axiomatic system. Now, as Badiou defines it, “an axiomatic presentation consists, on the basis of non-defined terms, in prescribing the rule for their manipulation (29).” Further he states, “It is clear that only an axiom system can structure a situation in which what is presented is presentation (30).” In other words an axiom system conditions ontology. This seems to be true (another axiom), but at the same time is not an axiom system beyond the demonstrable? So that the very conditions of ontology must be taken on something like faith? Is the axiom system not a piety? Of course, we know that Badiou is going to eventually talk about fidelity to the event (and thus the grand atheist will take part in a bizarre religious discourse), but for all the talk of Badiou’s extreme rationalism are we not ignoring that his system begins with its own leap of faith? I am here skipping over speaking of an individual axiom, but surely we should speak about the axiom of compositions (There are only multiples of multiples.)
There’s quite a bit we can talk about in these few chapters. I think it may be best to skip some of the issues brought up in his introduction, simply because they we will come across them again in later chapters. I have barely touched on the more interesting aspects of his thought, like his ‘recasting’ of Plato or his making the Void the proper name of being. For the latter I have not commented upon it because I am confused as to whether he has the right to name the Void as being and still claim to be presenting presentation through mathematics.
