Monday, March 06, 2006
(6:22 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Catching up on the Reading Group
After week one's impressive start to the Badiou reading group things have unfortunately fizzled a good bit. I'm for pressing on as it is probably the only way I'll read this book anything like soon, and I think I probably should. I've only recently gotten a hold of B&E and have committed to trying to catch up by this weekend in time to do the short presentation. I've read through Part I (pp. 1-80) thus far and further promised some preliminary remarks.First, with respect to mathematics - Badiou remarks upon maths' peculiar 'power to both fascinate and horrify' (19). Ever since the end of high school, however, the maths for me have rather been a temptation (a temptation that skews toward fascination rather than horrification). In the same way, ontology, chess (at one point also Go), and general philosophical competency have been temptations. Choices have to be made in life and, as of now, I can't find a way to justify (for myself) indulging any of these temptations. Perhaps down the road ... I'm reading Being and Event almost exclusively on the strength of the minor titular term. I'm engaging the maths only so much as I find necessary to grasp what's going on with respect to the situation, event, etc. As such, I'm going to take Badiou's 'practical' suggestion (19) and only really work with the pair of conceptual and textual meditations and leave the meta-ontological (or more strictly mathematical) meditations aside.
In Part I, I found Meditations Four and Six (on 'The Void' and 'Aristotle') the most stimulating. Med. 2 'Plato' was also of vital interest, but mostly explained in much greater detail what I understood of Badiou prior to picking up B&E. I knew that Badiou was a 'platonist of the multiple' but was not aware that he was also an 'aristotelian of the void.' As someone who once considered myself an Aristotelian highly sympathetic to attempts to read Plato and Aristotle together, I was more than a little impressed and, as an amateur, thoroughly convinced that Badiou is successfully extending the Platonic-Aristotelian project in a dazzling new direction.
Here, I should also comment briefly on a prior discussion I've had with Jared concerning Badiou and theology. I can see now where a denial of the link is to be found in 'the maths.' Still, from what I understand so far, I don't see how a negative theological orientation, especially Rosenzweig's, couldn't be perfectly consonant with what Badiou is doing. I think a militant of Rosenzweig could easily entertain a 'platonism of the multiple' and an 'aristotelianism of the void' and successfully make the charge that 'all cognition of the all begins in death,' and that the constitutive elements of the mulitiple can only be sutured together on the strength of revelation (or 'event'). I'll continue to look for problems in this regard, knowing that Badiou strenously denies death as critical to his thinking.
Finally, some remarks closer to the actual text: Badiou seems to me to take on Foucault by way of sideswipes. Analysis of 'mental illness' is named on p. 1 a 'non-philosophical practice' nevertheless important in the unfolding of '[a] post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject.' And in the section of most interest to me, Badiou writes with respect to 'The Void,' 'The logic of the lacuna, of what the count-as-one would have 'forgotten', of the excluded which may be positively located as a sign or real of pure multiplicity, is an impasse-an illusion-of thought, as it is of practice' (54). Immediately in the same section (54-56) we get Badiou's most rigorous description of the void. I simply don't get how an understanding of the void as something other than non-being, as an uncountable multiple that has to remain hidden below the surface in the artificial count-as-one of the multiple sutured to the structure of a situation, is any different from the 'logic of the lacuna.' To put things in terms of the non-philosophical practice of analyzing madness, what is the Badiouan problem with a suggestion that the situation of 'the spirit of capitalism' can only occur to the extent that those who won't work ( the beggar, the madman, the criminal) are forcefully hidden below the surface, not counted (in a census or sociological analysis or political engagement, etc), and further that proper attention to such a void or lacuna is a useful way to explode an unjust situation or even super structure?
