Saturday, March 04, 2006
(9:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Being and Event Reading Group: Week 3 (pp. 123 - 183)
I only have time to focus on one aspect of this weeks reading (and if anyone wants to add summaries of the meditations please email me and I'll arrange that) - the position that Badiou takes towards Nature and its non-existence. Badiou asks us to let the Greek understanding of physis to shine through the concept of nature. Following Heidegger we are to understand nature as gift, and thus as being's non-latency in its presentation. Following the Galilean revolution this aspect of nature was forgotten (under the sign of technicity, no?) while Platonic idea takes dominance. This creates an opposition between the poem and the matheme (an aside: isn't this also a "math-aphor"?) where Heidegger has taken the side of the poetic as the true saying of being. Badiou is not outright rejecting Heidegger, but he is saying that the poetic is not the site where being qua being is presented, which remains set theory. For being is not that which appears naturally, but must be interpreted by the matheme as the poem was interpreted by the Greeks through the matheme (is this not somewhat anachronistic?).
The natural thus situated nominates that which is consistent and remaining. But Nature remains a being-multiple and thus, because there can be no set of all sets and thus no total set, it cannot be nominated: "Nature has no sayable being."
Now this presents problems for someone like myself who wants to work with ecology and philosophy. Nature is read in ecology through the scientific process and has, historically, relied on a pragmatic mathematics (statistics) since the nature of working in a real ecosystem designates that experiments (and its mathematical models) can not be subtractive. Mathematical models cannot express the real status of natural ecosystems being (if we understand consistency in relative manner within geological time or, perhaps, even as a count-as-one), though they do express tendencies within the ecosystem they do not present its being as such. So I am lead to wonder what relation the presentation of the presentation of being as being has in relation to actual beings? Have we subtracted them out completely? And if so how does Badiou avoid the downfall of all science to have adequate knowledge of something since "there is always something imaginary in the operation of subtraction" (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 57)?
An organizational note: I am really swamped with work and a paper I’m preparing for conference. I was hoping that people would volunteer to do these short presentations of the reading and I myself hardly feel adequate or able to give the adequate amount of time every week. I have someone for week four, but if anyone is willing to take next week I would greatly appreciate it.
