Further thoughts on Badiou: A note

As I suggested in my earlier paper (in French) on Badiou’s Being and Event, on this site, the chaos/order or informe/form relationship at the very beginning of Badiou’s introduction of counting, sets, and representation, is a likely source of the novelty that emerges from the too static character of the orders of things. This could be taken further to ask about Badiou’s whole initial move in this book, which is of course at a point of origin for both Biblical and philosophical metaphysics. Maybe part of the problem is that his reliance on Cantor's idea of "inconsistent multiplicities" as sets, just as sets of infinite ‘internal’ size are also bounded, which makes them numerable and comparable as smaller and larger, and so in another sense finite, allows their chaotic muchness to be translated into "void" from the point of view of counting or naming. But multiplicities that do not cohere formally, which would make them also unities, are fruitful in ways that nothingness surely is by definition not. And this nothingness is also a retroactive point of view on something that is actually a muchness, however confusedly. Indeed, it is hard not to translate this from an ontological register into an epistemic one of a kind of Kantian in-itself that must have some definite form that we merely cannot (entirely?) know. The fruitful character of what is not organized perhaps deserves more consideration than theorizing Being via numbers or sets arranged linearly will likely allow. It would be easy enough to suppose with Laclau that language and rhetoric are more fundamental than mathematics, but of course for Badiou that means sophism, and mathematics conducts language and thought to truths through propositions.  Being and Event presents an elaborate edifice, and an interesting model, of Being qua thinkable (Parmenides’s equation of the two is introduced at the beginning as an axiomatic principle, which authorizes the use of mathematics as the ‘logic’ of Being, or ontology, though that begs the question of whether Being is given or appears or happens or ‘is’ only through a logos, and one that is a logic, or a mathematics). And it shows how any such constructive ordering of something like a world can come into crisis in the kind of way that is politically resonant as a kind of general theory of revolution, which is the book’s great aim and achievement, a general theory that is not tied to particularities of history and specific polities. The revolutionary crisis and possible shift or change is theorized as more discontinuous than continuous, taking up a line in Althusser and Foucault, more than Hegel, who clearly is Badiou’s principal antagonist and rival. The political idea is one of a conflict of points of view between modes of social organization that are of course also modes of organizations of all knowledge and understanding, and these are such that two regimes, again in the broad sense that applies to both (social) Being and thought, confront each other in almost mutual ignorance and indiscernibility. In fact, as in Hegel, the new regime or dispensation understands the old one and constructs the transition out of it, while the ancien régime is blind and cannot even see the difference. Thus, its point of view always fails to grasp the revolutionary as such, and sees what it grasps as vital as merely disorder or noise.

Badiou also accomplishes something important in his popular book Ethics, in suggesting that the good is not discovered or found but constructed. Truth for him is not, as in Heidegger, revelation, which would be still too close to the representation, that, in his sense (not Badiou’s, which is set theoretical and not epistemic, as Heidegger’s effectively is; Badiou’s is one that distinguishes in simple set theoretical terms what can otherwise be thought as presentation as appearance vs. representation as its reflective grasping, so that one sees not the thing presented but the appearance or showing of it as such, or in some versions, the appearance of the one showing), is bound up not only with the too-determinate grasping of what is given as such, but also with the propositional and mathematical thinking that he associated with the technological project. Truth is rather, for Badiou, construction and invention through experimentational work rather than just passive reflection on events and forms as in Heidegger. This allows a politics that Heidegger's thinking cannot. The latter can only give us an ethics, and even the left Heideggerian Agamben's politics is an ethics, and it is poetry, not collective labor.