Review of Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II
Slowly making my way through Badiou's oeuvre, and no doubt at some point in the next few years I will have gotten around to his Immanance of Truths. But in the meantime, here are some thoughts on his second Big Book, the Logics of Worlds (2006).
Attributed to Plato by ancient astronomers, the question of how to ‘save the phenomena’ was, so it was said, among the most pressing of issues for the earliest star gazers. For, if according to the rationalist strictures of ancient cosmology, celestial motions were to be accounted for by the divine regularity of periodic movement, how was it that actual observation would reveal aberrant paths, retrogressions of planets and uneven solar passages? How could it be that the appearance of planetary motion not coincide with the being of their postulated reality? On the one hand, then, Being: simple, regular, and sanctified. On the other, Appearance: messy, bodily, and erratic.
In terms less cosmological but at least as Platonic, such is the project of Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, which aims at just this reconciliation, appending, to his doctrine of Being - as laid out in his previous work, Being and Event - here, his logic of Appearing. It’s an undertaking just as ambitious and wide-ranging as it sounds, offering entirely new approaches to classic philosophical problems in their most universal breadth. From the most concrete to the most abstract: What is it to live? What is death? What is a body? How are we to understand change (from mere ‘modifications’ to - of course - the eruptions of events)? What about ‘objects’? Relations? Identity and differences? All these topics are broached here, with a distinctness entirely singular to this monster of contemporary metaphysics.
As for the nature and necessity of the ‘reconciliation’ (my term, not Badiou’s) involved, it has to do, largely, with the last (and thus most abstract) item on the list above: that of identities and differences. For where Being and Event leveraged the mathematics of set theory to ground ontology (and thus Being), it left Badiou with the problem of a rather restricted capacity to deal with differences. Among sets, identity and differences are defined by ‘belonging’ alone: if two sets have the same elements (a and b, say), they are identical; if they do not, if even one element is missing, then the sets are absolutely different. The stringency of this criteria left open the question of how to deal with relative differences: things which are similar or dissimilar to each other, the more and the less.
It’s here, in the effort to think though this almost maddeningly mundane issue, did Badiou run through the rigours of taking up set theory’s mathematical ‘rival’, category theory, in order to give it a ‘place’ among his grand system: that of dealing with the logics of appearance. Whence the full scope of Badiou’s effort here: to have bought together the two foundational frameworks of mathematics, all while extending the range and power of his philosophy to deal with questions that have riven the canon from Plato to Kant, Kiekregaard to Deleuze - all of whom make appearances in this book as so many foils through and against which Badiou carves out his own original place in the philosophical firmament.
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What then, of its success? Impeccable in its execution, the Logics of Worlds resembles, in the finery of its construction, something of an art object no less than a philosophical treatise. I mean this as praise, but it’s also where I have the most trouble in taking on its prescriptions as my own. So tightly bound are the ideas here to one another - math bleeding into concepts bleeding into examples - that one gets the feeling that, for all its seeming capaciousness, the problems responded to are in many ways problems internal to Badiou’s own system itself. Did I need to run through 300 pages of the Grand Logic - the first half of the book - in order to give expression and formal grounding to the idea that sometimes, things are similar and dissimilar to one another by degrees?
Or is this, as it sometimes inescapably feels, Badiou dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s - a compulsion for completeness rather than an instrument of illumination? Similarly, the treatment of ‘relation’ here, itself responsive to critiques levelled at Being and Event’s quiescence on the issue, while original and complex, still comes across as oddly isolated. What does one do with the theory of relations as derivative of multiplicity, other than note that it lends a neat coherence to Badiou’s preference for sets (which, in themselves, have no need for relations)? At my most ungenerous, the ‘saving of appearances’ here read not unlike the ever more complex addition of epicycles and deferents to early cosmological theories of geocentrism, meant to help square the theoretical circle of the sun revolving around the Earth.
Nonetheless, at his best, Badiou is a truly exhilarating author. His choice of enemies alone - what he calls ‘democratic materialism’, his peculiar but powerful characterisation of life lived without Events, roughly coeval with the reining ideology - make him worthy of reading. As the presentation of principles for an alternative way of living - one lives for the sake of an Idea or not at all says Badiou - in the Logics of Worlds, one gets a glimpse, too often obscured, of just what is possible when thought moves along axes orthogonal to world as we know it. Beyond knowledge, Events, the well of the void from which to draw the promise of the future. If we have the courage to seize it.
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