Tuesday, June 13, 2006
(10:18 PM) | Anonymous:
Militants Do It Diagonally
I was hoping to report that I had finished reading Badiou (or Being and Event, at any rate), and could therefore offer some kind of critical synopsis of the work - a book report, say, or perhaps a lighthearted account of the vicissitudes of attempting to digest the sections on the cardinality of the powerset of ω0 while travelling on the London underground. As things stand, I've now read through to the end of the book; but I don't feel in any sense as if I've finished it.The meditations in the latter part of the book, dealing with the subject, the indiscernible, generic procedures and forcing, move quickly over some technically very dense material, and much of the enjoyment I had been taking in the earlier mathematical presentation was lost when this shift in pace occurred. And a puzzle from earlier on remains unresolved: the self-belonging of ex in the mathème of the event remains a mysterious stipulation.
Intuitively, the latter suggests something like the fact that the name of the revolution simultaneously nominates and convokes the praxis (or procedure) of the revolutionaries; but the name of the revolution is not itself the revolution, and its belonging to the revolutionary situation is not the same as that situation's belonging to itself. There may be some significant reflexivity to militant praxis over and above its having a name for itself (the more fecund militant movements, in politics as in aesthetics, tend to have a self-critical, "emergent" or auto-poetic dimension; the ones that don't are called dogmatisms); but I'm not convinced that self-belonging in a set-theoretical sense provides an apt conceptual model for this. It's just a bit too convenient that it also happens to violate the axiom of foundation, thereby placing the Event beyond the pale of axiomatic set theory qua ontology.
So I remain at a loss, both to understand what the mathème of the event is supposed to be indicating, and to understand the proper relationship between the faithful procedure of linking multiples to the event via an operator of fidelity - realizing the kingdom of the Event-which-is-not by traversing the presented situation of which one is an inhabitant - and the generic procedure involved in forcing an indiscernible. I'm not sure if the relationship is properly mathematical, or metaphorical, or both, or neither. It's an open question; I'm left with the desire to read more, and try to make a little more sense of it all.
Reading Being and Event has changed my thinking in a couple of ways: firstly, it's deeply enriched my mental map of mathematics, by guiding me through the fundamentals of axiomatic set theory and showing me the basic connections between those fundamentals and some other mathematical topics; and secondly, it's made me feel much more kindly disposed towards militants of various stripes, for whom Badiou himself has an infectious admiration that is not, I believe, reducible to self-admiration (or admiration for a former self). So it has certainly repaid the effort; although I should say that every time I tried to read a section on the tube, I ended up having to go back and read that section again, twice. I look forward to the forthcoming book on category theory, and can only regret that even if certain well-placed individuals were to forward me sneak-previews of parts of it, my lousy French would leave me hopelessly ill-equipped to make the slightest sense of them.
