Alain Badiou's Being and Event, Mini-Review
I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. I'm putting a couple up here as part of my end of year 'round up' of books for 2022. Here's one for Badiou's Being and Event:
Like all great works of philosophy, Badiou’s Being and Event is a wager. A wager on the possibility of Events, of ruptures in the weave of things, both personal and political, staking itself there where the possibility of a better world shines like a light through the crack in things. This much, I think, is known even by those with a passing familiarity of Badiou, whose association with the theme of the Event has been at the heart of the philosopher that he is. Nonetheless, what seems to go often unremarked in glosses on Badiou’s philosophy is the rigor to which devotes himself to the question of - not the break of the Event, but the continuum of Being. Indeed, what is utterly striking in Being and Event is the attention given to continuity, and the attempt to think the discontinuous solely by means of taking continuity itself to the limit.
It is a little unorthodox, perhaps, to focus on the ‘Being’ side of Being and Event, and in some ways, it’s compensatory on my part on account of the inattention usually given to it. But it’s only by giving continuity - and thence Being - its full due, that the distinctness, not only of the Event, but of Badiou’s philosophy itself can be put into proper relief. After all, it is this and only this that explains the otherwise startling choice to identify - as Badiou does in perhaps his absolutely signature move - mathematics as nothing less than the discourse of ontology as such. It is mathematics, that is, that speaks Being, that is the discourse most adequate to its expression and its study by the otherwise finite 'configurations' that we (only sometimes, according to Badiou) are. And this to the extent that it is mathematics that is most suited to the study of the continuous, given the austere explicitness of its operations.Or to put it otherwise, what is distinct about mathematics is its ability to a-count (quite literally) for itself. All that happens in mathematics follows from the 'monotony' (Badiou's word) of its deductions, such that every step can be discerned, without ambiguity, from the last. What better than this investigation, operating 'without gaps', for the study of the continuous? But more importantly still - what better investigation to find, at its limit, what cannot be accounted for by this most rigorous formulation of continuity? And there lies the nub of Badiou's project: the effort to use math, as it were, against itself; to find, by mathematical means alone, the symptomatic points at which math itself gives way to what exceeds it, not from without, but from within. Hence, to take just one of these points: the study of infinity, so important here, which in the wake of Cantor, explodes outwards into an infinity of infinities, an index of the 'errancy of the quantitative', unmasterable on its terms.
To say all this - so much already - is to give nothing but the most minimal outline of the programme within, which is rich, far too rich, for any pithy summary as this to capture. While I've focused on the math - for me the most intriguing - it's also the case that at stake in all this is the realignment of the very possibilities of philosophy itself. For, by staking ontology on a discourse 'without concept' (i.e. math), the very privilege of the concept, for so long sovereign over philosophy, is here called into question - and with it, the past and future of what philosophy has been, and will be. If at least that past is addressed here too (in the guise of readings of Aristotle, Hegel, Leibniz, Pascal and others, alongside the math, and alongside the poets, who I've completely neglected), the philosophical future itself can only be radically other in the wake - don't make me say it, I have to say it - of the Event, of Being and Event.
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