the void of / in Badiou’s Ontology: a talk by Tzuchien Tho

With the generous support of Gallery 400, InterCcECT is very pleased to present “Nothing Just Isn’t (what it used to be): The Void and Structure,” a talk by Tzuchien Tho, researcher at The Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and The Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine.  Join us Thursday 25 April at 4pm!

 

abstract:

Alain Badiou inherited a series of concepts in the late 60’s that manifest a similar sort of argumentative strategy. From

Neo-Kantianism, French epistemologie, Hegelianism and structuralism, there were a number of different figures of the void, the nothing, indeed the “not”, all of which stood in as a reified repository for the undetermined and contingent (the virtual), the not-yet (the new in history), the horizon of determination and knowledge (regulative judgment). By looking at how Badiou refuted this construal of the problem of the void (the nothing and the like) in the late 60’s, I will demonstrate how these initial works led to his arguments concerning the void in the 1980’s provided a real alternative to those that he inherited. In turn, understanding Badiou’s rejection from this late 60’s context of treating the notion of the void sheds light on the meaning of his “mathematical ontology” through set theory and allows us to evaluate his larger philosophical project from a different historical vantage.

 

Clayton Crockett on Deleuze

I wanted to bring to the attention of readers a new book by AUFS affiliate, Clayton Crockett. As the title suggests, Deleuze Beyond Badiou presents an account of Deleuze’s philosophy by taking as its occasion Badiou’s polemical reading of Deleuze. The account that emerges will be very useful to many readers of Deleuze. Though I am not here offering anything like a proper review, I should say that I found particularly compelling the way that Crockett emphasized certain concepts or themes — most notably the interstice, the three syntheses of time, and the time-image.

Preview of a book on Badiou and theology

Hollis Phelps, whom I met when we both participated in a panel on Agamben at this year’s AAR (his paper can be found here), has written a preview of his forthcoming book Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology at the Political Theology blog.

Badiou on the Cultural Revolution

Here’s an article I found [PDF]. I’m planning on reading it this weekend to try to cure my probably under-informed knee-jerk reaction that advocating the Cultural Revolution is similar to being really excited about Stalin’s purges.

Badiou the Left Heideggerian: Some thoughts

I have only begun to think this through, so maybe it will turn out to be entirely wrong — but I think that Badiou essentially belongs in the series of “left Heideggerians” that includes Agamben and Nancy. As far as I understand it, the big point that supposedly separates Badiou from Heidegger is that Badiou embraces the infinite while Heidegger is stuck with the pathos of finitude. Yet I think there are nonetheless very significant structural similarities and that this distinction isn’t doing as much work to distance Badiou from Heidegger as he thinks.

Obviously there’s the Event.

A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on Radical Thinking”

First let me say that, while this post will likely come across as confrontational, I do have a respect for Harman, particularly for his intellectual energy and literary output. I’ve never met him and can’t count him a friend, but I have corresponded with him on a few occasions. I must admit that his philosophy and politics (or lack thereof) leave me cold. A bit of context: my dissertation of 2001, which became my first book in 2004, is an analysis of networks as political systems, so I feel I have a lot to say about the topic of objects and networks. I’m also a computer programmer and, similar to someone like Ian Bogost, have actually coded the kind of object-oriented systems that OOO describes. (To his credit Harman rejects this association, claiming that “his” OO has nothing to do with computer science’s OO. But that’s a flimsy argument in my view, particularly when the congruencies are so clear. As Zizek might say, channeling Groucho Marx: if it’s called a duck, and quacks like a duck, don’t let that fool you — it really is a duck!)

A Life Worthy of the Idea and the Appearence of Trees

Alain Badiou is always a pleasure a read even if, like me, one isn’t convinced by or a disciple of his philosophy. The first full book in French I read was Badiou’s Manifeste pour la philosophie, which was in many ways a short summary of Being and Event. He has repeated this gesture with his (recently translated) Second Manifesto for Philosophy, which is a summary of the main ideas present in Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. LoW contains an interesting development of his theory of fidelity, which most readers will be familiar with from his St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism where St. Paul is an instance of one being faithful to an event. Another way of saying this is that St. Paul, like all faithful subjects, “lived a life worthy of the Idea”. In LoW he expands this to a general theory of “subjectivation” or different relational decisions regarding an event are different ways of being a subject. So in addition to a faithful subject, there is also a reactionary subject (who rejects the event) and an obscure subject (who tries to turn the event, founded on the void, into some transcendent body like the Nation, or God, or Race, or Nature, or what have you). I was really taken with this and so Daniel Whistler and me used it in our editorial introduction to After the Postsecular and the Postmodern (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository) when writing about the different ways theologians, theorists, and philosophers related to the post-secular event.

Badiou vs. Nancy on Libya

Jean-Luc Nancy recently came out in favor of the Libya intervention, and Alain Badiou is disappointed.

Self-Promotion

Has it come to this for Alain Badiou, that he has to blurb his own books?

Is Badiou Behind the Wu Tang Clan?

Is The RZA’s mathematical concept of truth the imported from Badiou? “The Truth shall set you free from all things.” (Props to Rodrigo Morales for the heads up)