|
On August 06 2014 04:31 bookwyrm wrote:Haha, I don't think Badiou thinks that everything can be understood with nothing but mathematical rigor. He might have written some books about set theory, but his philosophy is irrationalist at its core (the subject is constituted by its fidelity to a truth-event, but the determination of what is or is not a truth-event is a leap of faith because it's formally undecidable). Show nested quote +On August 06 2014 04:26 koreasilver wrote:
That being said, nowadays I think NA humanities and social science students would do better if their curriculum necessitated some logic classes. I'll drink to that. Then I could talk about math without everyone going glassy-eyed and calling me a platonist
Badiou's ontology is entirely grounded on his weird idiosyncratic interpretation of set theory. He doesn't think that everything can be understood by mathematical rigour, but to say that his philosophy is "irrationalist" at its core is strange given that his notion of truth and political event is not constituted by a "leap of faith". The man is an Althusserian structuralist, not an existentialist or a French postmodernist.
|
But it's undecidable whether or not something is a truth-event. Because something else can take the appearance of a truth-event. For example Badiou thinks that St. Paul is a truth-event, he thinks that May '68 is a truth-event, he thinks that Marx is a truth-event, but he doesn't think that Nazism is a truth-event. How can you tell the difference between Nazism and the true Emancipatory struggle? It's formally undecidable. Nazism has the appearance of an Event even though it is not, it is a psuedo-Event. It's like Godel - every inconsistent system includes a proof of its own consistency. So deciding on what to call a truth-event is ultimately an irrational act that grounds the whole "structural" edifice that is constructed through the Fidelity to it.
I'm just starting on Being and Event but I've read a bit about him. Here's from the translator's preface:
"However, there is a problem which is often mentioned in the commentary on Badiou's work, a problem about belief, action, and ideas: inasmuch as a subject retroactively assigns sense to the event, and there are no objective criteria determining whether the procedure the subject is involved in is generic or not, there is no distinction between subjectivization in a truth procedure and ideological interpellation. In fact, Badiou has built in one safeguard to prevent the confusion of truth procedures and ideologies, and that is that the former is initiated by the occurrence of an event *at an evental site*. He recognizes that many practical procedures occur which invoke a certain fidelity - his example is Nazism - but he argues that they neither originate from an evental site, nor are they generic, being fully determined by existing knowledge. However, Badiou also says that there is no guarantee that a procedure is generic, and so we do not possess a sure-fire method of identifying evental sites. Consequently, the only answer to whether the evental site is at the origin of a procedure or not is local: that is, it depends on a concrete analysis of the locality of the procedure. The distinction between generic truth procedures and ideologies is thus a practical matter, to be dealt with by those locally engaged in the procedure. There is no global guarantee of the absence of ideology"
Badiou's philosophy is rationalist but at its core it is irrationalist. I think he is the complete opposite from the Anglo philosophers, who take as their starting point the program of Frege-Hilbert-Russell and then have to somehow absorb the scandal of Godel... Badiou on the other hand is constructing a rationalist, mathematical ontology but on the basis of the scandal itself - he takes Godel as his starting point, rather than having to integrate Godel into an existing set-theoretical philosophical programme.
I'm not defending the guy and I haven't read much of him yet, this is just my feeling about him at the moment. I think he's very interesting though. He's not an Althusserian - Althusser refused to cooperate with the students in 68 which was a huge event for Badiou, you have to keep in mind his Maoism
|
How in the world is Badiou not an Althusserian simply because Althusser refused to cooperate with the students in 68? That doesn't say much about the actual substance of this conceptual work which Badiou is steeped in. In the history of the French academy Badiou was reknowned for being an ideological acolyte of Althusser in his early days, and contemporary French Maoism probably wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for Althusser's grounding work. The return of Marxist structuralism in popular culture lately is mostly at the hands of Badiou. Obviously Badiou isn't just parroting Althusser and doing nothing else, but to say that Badiou isn't Althusserian in the broadest way is pretty silly. Both Althusser and Maoism view that Marxism is a partisan political decision before it is a science, which Badiou adopts. The crucial difference that I know of from what I've read so far is that whereas for Althusser Marxism as such is the grounding and overarching science, Badiou seems to privilege math as an ontological and metaphysical ground for his Marxism.
As for your assumptions on Badiou's notion of the Truth-event, I think you're a bit off. Reading his recent writings over the year I didn't get the impression that you got at all. If anything Badiou is rather quite assured of the possibility of grasping what the Truth-event, which is why he's so quick to play the pretender philosopher king so much these days. If anything, doesn't the excerpt of the translator's preface you posted contradict what you wrote above it? You might not be able to apprehend whether or not a historic event is a Truth-event formally, but the "concrete analysis of the locality of the procedure" is not an "irrational" act. The marginalized revolutionary force, which Badiou understands as that which is literally outside of the ideological structure of society, for example, might not be able to be apprehended "formally" but the activity of this revolutionary force isn't seen as irrational. They have a certain sense to them even if it might be incomprehensible at the moment to an onlooker. Badiou is always making dialectical moves. He's a Marxist structuralist and I think that to import some pseudo-Kierkegaardian notions into Badiou would be a mistake. I would be pretty hard pressed to find any serious Badiou reader to call his thought irrationalist. I'm not a very serious Badiou reader - I don't like his philosophical work, his political theory, or even the person himself - but idk. I would like to be more charitable to him than to say that his entire work actually just buys into and crumbles under the whole "constructivist" discourse that he has so much disdain for (even if I might personally think so). I know this isn't what you're trying to do, but you're importing some foreign concepts and assumptions into Badiou here, I think.
|
interesting. you clearly know more about it than I do so you're probably right. I guess I just think the 68 thing does make more of a difference in their philosophical content (for example, I don't think Althusser is the kind of guy who would go around thinking about "pure multiplicity"). I also see more of the kierkegaard thing in it. But I have read very little Badiou and Zizek imports foreign concepts into all of his readings so I'm sure that doesn't help. (In fact, what I'm saying is undoubtedly mostly Zizek's Badiou)
I'll admit that I don't really know what "structuralism" is any more, so I don't know how to talk about whether or not he is one.but it would seem to me that even if Althusser lays some "grounding work" there is still a generational gap between him the younger people who were the actual "maoists." And they seem to me different than Althusser, but I'm not nearly knowledgeable about that to argue about it. I always thought Althusser was an idiot and a terrible writer so I haven't read much of him.
At least I can say, from my naive viewpoint, they are enough different so that I hate Althusser but I think Badiou is interesting.
I feel like I could defend a couple of things I was saying but I haven't really read enough. I think about what you say as I read more.
Mostly I'm just interested in set theory and I'm interested to see what he does with it. I do think mathematics and ontology are closely related. Maybe not in the same way as Badiou. I think Manuel DeLanda is pretty close to thinking correctly about it.
edit: I thought I remembered Althusser saying basically that Marxism WAS a Science because it viewed things from the standpoint of Truth, i.e. the proletariat ("Marx discovered the Third Continent of Science etc etc") but it's not so much as it's a political decision before it's a science, but that it's a political decision and the adoption of the standpoint of Science all at once. Or something. Idk I just thought the entire thing was inane :D
edit: I think it might have something to do with the fact that there is a kind of retroactivity to the Event which makes it exist only after the Subject recognizes it, which is why sometimes there are "evental sites" but not "Events." So these evental sites exist as virtual potentialities but it's only this sort of irrational self-positing after the fact which makes them into Events. that's what strikes me as the irrationalist bit. but maybe that's not in fact what he says, I have no clue.
I mean, listen to this:
As far as I am concerned, I quite agree that philosophy depends on some non- philosophical fields. And I have called these fields the "conditions" of philosophy. I would simply like to say that I do not limit the conditions of philosophy to the progress of science. I propose a much larger set of conditions, under four possible types: science, but also, politics, art, an love. So my own work depends, for instance, on a new mathematical concept of the infinite, but also on new forms of revolutionary politics, on the great poems of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Pessoa, Mandelstam or Wallace Stevens, on the prose of Samuel Beckett, on the new ways of love which have emerged in the context of psychoanalysis and the complete transformation of all questions concerning sexuation and gender.
he thinks that "art" and "love" are two of the conditions of philosophy. sounds kinda irrationalist to me. I'll pick a different word if you don't like that one.
edit: I have also read Badiou talk about how Love is the act of "raising the contingent to the status of a necessity" which also seems like an irrationalist thing to me
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
