« hacia la multitud | Main | Click here to receive your very own Ph.D. in..... »
badiou
Well I've been reading Badiou laetely and I've got to say: ~
But I guess that joke's been made before.
By Swifty | February 9, 2007 in Badiou | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/361357/16018350
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference badiou:
Comments
laetely?
Posted by: Matt | Feb 10, 2007 10:34:15 AM
so yer saying I shouldn't tackle Being and Event afterall ??????
Posted by: highlowbetween | Feb 10, 2007 1:13:34 PM
Speaking of jokes, and doing so via a bit of self-promotion, anyone want to help me with my own Badiou issues?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Feb 10, 2007 7:32:41 PM
Far be it for me to actually discourage someone from reading Being and Event. I am slogging my way through now but my reading is tinged with a kind of impatience. And that's my problem, but where it comes from is a suspicion along the following line: "So Badiou you're claiming that mathematics is ontology and so, first of all, what are you seeking? What do you want an ontology for, mathematical or otherwise? What problem does having an ontology solve, for you? Ontology is concerned with Being. What is it about Being that draws your attention? The Western prejudice is in favor of unitary Being. But mathematics provides an ontology that is multiple, non-unitary. But are you so sure that the procedures of mathematics, even if they produce multiples instead of the dreaded One, have enough existential umph to act as an *ontology*?"
Because if that is where Badiou is going, and as I say I am slogging through and these views are tentative, then am I that interested in it? Just on this point I read an Introduction by John Rajchman to Gilles Deleuze, _Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life_ the other day, and in there Rajchman writes of one Claude Imbert who "examines 'why and how an empiricist philosopher, as Deleuze certainly was, became all the more interested in logic.' Her _Pour une histoire de la logique_ may be read as an attempt to imagine what a history of logic might look like from this peculiar empiricist point of view; it thus expands on her earlier work _Phenomenologies et langues formulaires_, in which she closely examines the internal difficulties in the phenomenological and analytic traditions leading to the late Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. In this way, Imbert offers a more promising approach to the problem of the relation of Deleuzian multiplicity to set theory than does Alain Badiou in his odd attempt to recast it along Lacanian lines."
Posted by: Swifty | Feb 10, 2007 7:54:21 PM
prologema to set theory: define a "set", or, er, point to one....or to that eazy E of Inclusion
Posted by: Gnominalist | Feb 11, 2007 11:49:46 AM
I think that joke is hilarious.
I don't know what B'd like this but I don't read B as making a positive claim about math=ontology, I read it as deflationary. That is, if you want to talk about being qua being, being sans all qualities save its being-ness, then go do math cuz that's what math does. If you want to talk about being(s) with qualities - being qua insomniac midwesterner, being qua trends in labor law, etc - then don't do ontology. Events are of being not qua being, and ontology can't recognize (isn't a good vocabulary for) that. That's a lot of what I got out of B's big old book.
Posted by: Nate | Feb 28, 2007 5:02:08 AM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
