Being and Event
- ISBN13: 9780826495297
- Condition: USED – Very Good
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Product Description
“Being and Event” is the centrepiece of Alain Badiou’s oeuvre; it is the work that grounds his reputation as one of France’s most original philosophers. Long-awaited in translation, “Being and Event” makes available to a… More >>
Perhaps because I am French and know this book for a long while, it has not for me the charm of novelty and I am not so fascinated by it. Badiou’s application of the set theory to the ontology of history is never really justified in his work. “The mathematicians dream when they come to being”, said once Plato. Morever, the style – except for the presentation of some aspects of Gödel’s theorem – is gothic, sometimes really obscure and, at least in French, dated. If you like a certain posture, both dogmatic and despiseful for all that is not Badiou’s thought (except Heidegger, strangely interpreted, and Marxism), you should read this opus. “Being and Event” did not have a strong impact on european philosophy – outside a small circle of disciples – and I doubt very much that it will have one on american thought.
Rating: 3 / 5
The feats of set theory are here employed as a proof that multiplicity (Deleuzian “virtuality”, Nitzschean “chance” or “eternal return”) defines the structure of being. More deeply, this entails the projection of Deleuze’s structural design whereby he conceived of the virtual level of being (multiplicity of singularities) onto actual being itself, onto actuality, at the expense of any ontic configuration whatsoever, which henceforth acquires a transitory character. There remains, however, the problem related to the emergence of the “event” from the horizontal and homogenous texture of multiplicity. Through this rupture, Badiou unconsciously reproduces that duality he (and Zyzek too) accuses Deleuze of perpetrating in his ontological argument. And yet, seen from the Bergsonian standpoint, Badiou’s scheme seems far more dual than Deleuze’s. Most possibly, Badiou should do away with the notion of event altoghether.
Rating: 5 / 5
Forget Descartes and be prepared to review your mathmatical set theory– Badiou will teach you how to understand the world as multiplicities instead of individuals. He will revolutionize how you think of thought and being. His discussion of the void is especially revealing– there does not exist “one” in the beginning; there is only the empty set. If you are a student of modern philosophies or post-structuralism, you must read this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
A must read for every thinking adult. Must be followed by ‘Logic of Words’
Rating: 5 / 5
Badiou’s work is something of a hybrid. His use of analytical philosophy and logical notation runs at variance with the usual Continental practice of abstract linguistic poetizing. The book was completed nearly 20 years ago, though at the time it did not lend itself to ready comprehension because Badiou made four affirmative assumptions that went against the spirit of the time.
For Badiou situations are nothing more than pure in different multiplicities. Consequently differences do not point to norms. If true truths exist they are in different to differences. So cultural relativism can never go beyond trivial statements that different situations exist. Such relativism cannot tell us anything about what, among the differences, looked legitimately matters to subjects. Furthermore the structures of situations in themselves do not deliver truths per se. As a consequence, nothing normative can be drawn from the simple realist examination of the becoming of things. In particular, a truth is solely constituted by a rupturing with the order which supports it, never as in effect of that order. This insight seems to be restating Godel’s theorem. Badiou names this type of rupture “the event”. For him authentic philosophy begins, not in structural facts such as cultural, linguistic or political perspectives, but uniquely in what takes place in what remains in the form of a strictly incalculable emergence.
Next Badiou claims a subject is nothing other than an active fidelity to the event of truth. This means the subject is a militant truth. Badiou philosophically reintroduced the notion of militant during a time when the consensus of thinkers was that any engagement of this type was archaic. Not only did he found this notion, but also considerably enlarged it. Badiou sees the militant in the political activist working for human rights and environmental justice, but also for the artist-creator, the scientists who opens up by new theoretical field, or the lover who enchants the world. For Badiou the being of truth is generic because it proves itself an exception to any pre-constituted predicate of a situation in which that truth is deployed. In other words, although it is situated within a world, a truth does not retain anything expressible from that situation. A truth concerns everyone in his much as it is a multiplicity that no particular predicate can circumscribe. Therefore, the infinite work of a truth is thus that of a generic procedure. And to be a subject, and not just a simple individual animal, is to be a local active dimension of such a procedure.
Badiou has created a philosophical classic that will puzzle and confound many graduate students and colleagues for years to come. The work is modular a series of 37 meditations upon the previous postulates of classic Western thinkers. Plato and Cantor are taken to task about the meaning of the multiple and the nature of the void. Heidegger and Galileo are examined with regards to the nature of time and infinity, event and ontology. Pascal and Holderlin are interrogated about the nature of choice and inference. Leibniz and Godel are contrasted with regards to the nature of quantity in the limits of formal systems. Badiou becomes more constructive when reviewing the nature of the event as construed by P.J. Cohen. In many ways the event becomes a way of dealing with multiple change and conditions without presuming upon consciousness of time. Likewise, Badiou reinvents the nature of the subject, going beyond the classic critique of Lacan. Grasped in its being, the subject is solely be finitude of the generic procedure, the local effects of an eventual fidelity. What the subject produces is the truth itself, which is an indiscernible part of the situation. However the infinity of this truth transcends it. It is abusive to say that truth is a subjective production. Rather a subject is much taken up in fidelity to the event and suspended from truth; from which it is forever separated by chance. For Badiou the subject is ever situated between the decidable and the ineluctable. As such, he does not have a theory of consciousness so much as a mirroring of events without limit.
Rating: 5 / 5