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8/13/2019 Pigs, Stars, Gods and Alain Badious Mathematical Language of Being
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Pigs, Stars, Gods and Alain Badious Mathematical Language of Being
Graham Giles
Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry
University of British Columbia
3368 Baird Road
North Vancouver
British Columbia, Canada
V7K 2G7
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Abstract
This paper examines some of the central concepts in the oeuvre of French philosopher
Alain Badiou, reading them as conditions of new possibility for dialogues which inform
and sustain educational thought. It commences with a general overview of Badious
mathematical ontology, and continues by way of critical engagements of Badiouianthought with the ethically authoritative figures of the other, difference and plurality.
Badious rejoinder to these figures is then examined in some detail, through his
conceptions of the void, the event, truth and finally the new subjectivities arisingtherefrom. The author argues that Badiou provides a conception of philosophy which re-
signifies mathematics education while at once re-summoning educational thought to
neglected mathematical analytics toward a durable and authoritative problematics ofcreativity and change.
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If the one is not, nothing is. Parmenides
Platos Parmenides introduce[s] us to the singular joy of never seeing the moment of
conclusion arrive. Badiou (2007, p. 23)
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write the following:
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is
categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure
(p. 82). In these registers, the philosophy of Alain Badiou may minimally be very
successful, beyond which even a significant intervention into the thought of our time. As
such, it is also often uncomfortably foreign, unfamiliar yet strangely resonant, possessed
of a canny untimliness of the sort which Wendy Brown argues is the mtier of critique. If
philosophy, risen from the disingenuous myth of its end, is to be taken up as Zupani
(2004) suggests, it must pull itself away from the immediate grip of its own conditions,
while nevertheless remaining under the effect of these conditions (p. 190). Badiou
accomplishes such sleight of thought with aplomb, rigor and ardency in ways that this
paper hopes to show are new conditions of possibility for thought in education. As these
very broadly concern the mathematical, they may be introduced here with the caveat of a
novices enthusiasm as their guiding thread. My objective here is to faithfully convey
elements of Badious oeuvre as new points of departure for the thinking of mathematics
in education, and, more broadly, in education newly of being, truth and the subject,
Badious foremost preoccupations. That these might provoke and enrich educational
thought is my curious hope. It is cautious as well, as if under the sign of Derridas (2003)
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relation to his masters (whom he names as Heidegger and Freud): I betray them because
I want to be true to them (p. 9). This necessary betrayal is not simply of an impossible
faithfulness of transmission, but additionally of modesty in inevitable invention; that the
exegeses which follow would accord with the spirit which animates them, a spirit I
welcome and introduce perhaps anew, and hereinafter indicate with the proper name
Alain Badiou.
Ontology and Mathematics: The Operation of the Count-as-One
Badious magnum opus, Being and Event (2007), argues for two fundamental
propositions: first that mathematics is ontology, and second that the new happens in being
under the name of the event. I shall leave aside the second for the time being and begin
with the first. I will do so with the question of ontology, in preparation for the broadly
mathematical incitements to follow. Ontology is literally the logic of being, or thinking
what it is to be in contrast to the clearly implicated questions of doing or knowing. For
Badiou, ontology is itself necessarily what he calls a situation which, as like any other
of what might be said to exist, he calls a structured presentation (p. 25). Badious
ontology is however completely opposed to something (a meaning or even a presence)
implied by or inferred from what is, from situations as suchand thus is no
existentialism.
A situation in Badious onto-logics is not a particularity, or even a collection of
particularities (like his pigs, stars and gods), with some ineffable unknowable part by
which to orient ethical aspiration or alternately prosecute its anxieties. A situation is
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rather the result of an operation which renders beingby instead an unrepresentable
void to which he gestures with the phrase pure multiplicityinconsistency. This
inconsistent multiplicity is constitutive of all that is presented, of everything in fact that
is. Ontology is thus the presentation of presentation whose logic, and here we first
encounter the mathematical, is a function of an operation which Badiou calls the count-
as-one (p. 26).
Inconsistent multiplicity is rendered ontologically consistent according to the one
of which it is pluralized and composed, as structure. This Badiou calls a kind of inert
irreducibilityof the domain of the presented-multiple for which the operation of the
count occurs (p. 28). By what Badiou calls his meta-ontology (which means a
thinking about a thinking of being), thought is summoned to its unique vocation to think
what we might consider the lacuna of the one. In this what must be found are ways to
deploy the unique capacity of thought to discern the multiple without having to make a
one of it (p. 29). There are no criteria for this discernment, it is in fact unsayable, and its
object must always necessarily elude the guarantee of the brute inertia of
representation. I shall shortly get to how this might be possible but first must be done in
some halting fashion with the question of Badious conception of being. For Badiou
there is no structure of being (p. 26) thus what he calls the axiomatic decision from
which he says his entire discourse originates: that of the non-being of the one (p. 31).
This apprehension necessarily is self-undermining, it is an impasse which does not
possess thinkable determinations, yet its abandonment to the dialectic of the one
leads to the general ruin of thought in nihilism and the absence of a basis on which to
infer justice (p. 31). I hope this brief introduction to some of the central conceptual
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contours of Badious thought indicates the breadth of the import of his engagement; it is
literally one in the barely discernable, yet on which everything hinges. His audacity in
this is not what it may at first seem. He undertakes the charge in part in resistance to the
abandonment of rationality from the task of confronting fanaticism, and certainly dogma
of every kind and in reconstituting an empowered and creative subjectivity.
So then, what is this elusive being of Badious, within which emanates all that is,
this nothing that ineluctably follows from the non-being of the one? Why is it (and not
what apparently in any way merely is) a necessary predicate for a thinking of beginning
(or the Event), truth (which constitutes the subject) and indeed what Badiou calls the
logic of change? Perhaps, in the tradition of Socratic wisdom, I should begin and
approach this question with what Badiou argues being is not, in figures of the ones
hydra-like sophistications, its mythical pretensions to totality. That these might be
figures which undergird many putatively emancipatory discourses in educational research
is no accident, it is in fact part of the wager of bringing Badiou to educational thought.
The radicality of his thinking introduces an element of creative controversy, of the sort
which might be seen to contribute to democratic cultureeven when the democratic
cultures own pretensions (in perhaps figures like the other, difference, and plurality)
become subject to critique. Surely democracy is a term which must be signified anew if
it is to meet adequately what it will encounter (unless one is to assume the formula for
justice is an acquired province of some sort of ethical elite). It is in fidelity to this
renovating assertion that one may encounter thought like Badiousand in a clear
resistance to what Foucault (1994) names the blackmail of the enlightenment (p. 53)
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by which one is compelled to provide alternatives, or a statement of a position for or
against the enlightenment itself, before granted a welcome for ones critique.
The Other, Difference and Plurality
For Badiou all that is presented, and given to be represented in thought, is the
result of the count-as-one which renders pure multiplicity inconsistent, as what we may
know of being, or anything else for that matter. It is tempting in some, often quasi-
theological, thought to interpellate its obverse as a sort of radical alterity, as the other.
This Great Temptation (Badiou, 2007, p. 26), as Badiou calls it, assigns to the drama
of the concept the idea that the other-than-ones can be thought (p. 34) as a lacunal
abstraction (p. 38), or, worse, that it can be neither known nor thought. This godlike
institution is reiterative nonetheless of the One of being, torn from the multiple, and
nameable exclusively as absolute Other. In what he calls a romantic trembling of the
Open, Badiou decries a mystical annihilation by which a presence is gained of the
being of the One as non-being (p. 39). The other is thus an exception, one whose ruse is
the annulment of all functions of the count of One while instituting its effect under the
sign of its absence (p. 26)as, most potently for example, the myth of the painful
absence of myth (p. 39). What Badiou calls this sabotage of thought is accomplished
by none other than the poetic resources of language, in non-mathematical ontologies,
whereby grounding is accomplished in the decision to declare that beyond the multiple,
even in the metaphor of its inconsistent grandeur, the one is (p. 42). Badiou calls all this
an effect of the security of language, the trajectory of proximity of a poetic ontology
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(I admit, I barely escaped it he allows at one point) and, most evocatively, the folly of
trying to save God (p. 46). He names Heidegger as enslaved by it, Plato as elevating
this oneover the all(an order which Aristotle insidiously inverts) and Deleuze, Badious
great shadow-presence and interlocutor, invested in it as formal distinctions (the many of
rhizomic interrelation) masquerading as other than ontological onesall of which, for
Badiou is, most important, an effacement of singularity, the most important
preoccupation of contemporary philosophy.
For Badiou the other cannot designate the gap between the one and the other-
than-ones, because the one is not, he avers that surreptitiously it is in regard to
themselves that the others are Others (p. 33). Against the inevitable inference of the
other as foundational alterity, for Badiou being can never be an object as such: Its
representationimmediately corrupts the necessity, for any ontological operation, of de-
objectification (p. 11). Pure multiplicity (the nothing) is by definition and of necessity
inaccessible to presentation, its structures and thought, although only thought can
intimate it. It is, as Meillassoux (2008) argues, the implicate ancestral chaos of unreason.
The one (an effect of an operation) isnot, and so, as for Parmenides, nothing is. The
consequences and implications are significant, not the least of which is that ethics
founded in the other are a transitive destination in thought.
If the other is a dubious and even duplicitous formulation, a figure not uncommon
to aspirations to justice in educational discourse, what then of difference, another in the
pantheon of late modern signposts to justice, meaning and democracy? For Badiou,
difference is another instance of presented multiplicity, or discursive effect of the count-
as-one. One way Badiou (2006a) bars the relational concept of difference as
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ontologically germane is in arguing that every elucidation of discontinuity serves to
establish the idea of continuity (p. 33). To think under the ontological law which
Badiou asserts pure multiplicity implies is to know nothing apart from the multiple-
without-one (p. 59, emphasis added). A radical re-thinking of creativity and its
subjectivities, this knowledge forecloses any index of difference within what it refers
to, it indicates nothing other than the unpresentable as such by what Badiou calls the
inaugural gesture of ontology: the pure utterance of the arbitrariness of a proper name
(p. 59).
This enigmatic sign which consumes itself is a name only, and not a relation.
Badiou calls this proper name of being the inert, ubiquitous (his word is generic) void.
Its difference cannot be attested, because nothing differentiates it (p. 68), it is a
boundary without edge. For Badiou the question of difference elides that of the same
which is a figure neither consensual nor ideological but rather, as ontological, that of a
generic inconsistency which haunts all presentation, and destabilizes regimes of
representation by which structure is governed in understanding (this via the totalizing
function of what Badiou calls the state, not the sociopolitical configuration however
which subsumes presentation to representation and conflates ontological inclusion and
belonging). The same of Badious thought is difficult to glimpse through the mists of
liberal democratic cant for numerous reasons, but remains compelling inasmuch as,
unlike difference, it refuses thought a final destination.
This impossible detour toward the void continues via a third concept which
Badiou argues is its effacement. This figure which also proposes to account for the
plethora being (especially one adequate to democratic commitments), but is in fact again
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its obscurity is that of plurality. In many ways a precursor concept to that of difference,
the plural can be found in Badious ontologics as the ancient correspondent of the one:
the many. Badiou contrasts his analytic of the pure multiple with here the consistent
multiple, or plurality, a many consisting of ones: Only the operating there is of the
one enables the many to be (p. 35). The many is the effect of the count, a fabric spun
entirely of the normative power of the One, whose name is principal (p. 47). A
structured presentation which depends on the one, the many elides the Greeks dream
induced by the non-being of the one, as reconstituted by Badiou. To think the
philosopheme of the many is to renounce the necessary subtraction (of being from
presentation) of ontological thought as he elaborates it, it is to deny the resources of the
non-being of the one to thought, to reinstall the finitude which Badiou argues is
especially characteristic of post-Kantian thought. In many ways the least radical of my
three ways of not thinking the non-being of the one, I consider it last because its
condition as such may be its broader palatability and thus its more ominous power in
suppressing thought.
At this moment then, we might say we find ourselves with being as some no-thing
unthinkable (without certain mathematics obscure to most) yet anterior and ubiquitous,
accessible by a naming without object, by a thought which depends upon what cannot
belong to a situation yet which it always includes. This is the errancy of the subtly
unhinging phantom remainder which haunts every presentation from within, and
indicates the void in the event it precipitates (Badiou, 2007, p. 53). It is also affirmed in
the constitutive act of a subject to truth and thus the beginning of an active, committed
and searching ethics. It is an ethics however elaborated in the condition of inconsistency,
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one which does not fetishize it in prejudicial distinctions such at the other, difference and
plurality. These are seen in Badious (2008) thought as the very pillars by which
contemporary myths of progress in all domains sustain a horrible indifference (p. 80) to
the dimensions of what we might call the challenge of being and its calls to justice and
trutha challenge which refuses so many of the verificatory moral romances on which
education and its thought find uneasy, and thus vociferous, nourishment.
What Badiou reclaims from Plato and gives us to think as the wellspring of this
elusive ontological truth process is mathematics. This is explicitly not because being is
mathematical (an unfortunate suspicion which might befall one thinking mathematics
on a model of certainty, or by the historicism of it as concept) but because mathematics
accomplishes ontology, it enacts being wherein the void is in truth the name of being
(p. 72). As existence is presented in the effect of a count, a mathematical operation,
being is expressed axiomatically in mathematical lexica. This is how Badiou proposes to
think singularity, by which, he avers, everything of any importance is encountered. It is
surprisingly not a problem given as much notice as one might assume in education.
The Enactment of Set Theory: That the One is Not
Badiou demarks the history of the relation between mathematics and philosophy
as distinguishable among what he calls the little and the grand styles. In many ways,
the little is what prevails, is the familiar progenitor of math anxiety, and devolves from
and is implicated in what Badiou (2006a) calls its role to manage a personnel
comprising teachers and researchers (p. 3). This is mathematics in the familiar
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discourse of the Master. It is taken up in related little style philosophy as scholasticism
whose goal is to eliminate a frightening master-signifier by way of the deployment of
logic and language in the compulsive labeling of a clarificatory approach (p. 4-7).
Little more than the enforcement of the pre-existing categories, little style thinking of
mathematics is likely the dominant mode of address to the mathematical in schools. By
way of the misguided invocation of absolutes, it moves rarely beyond the sterile
controversies (p. 7) it sustains and stages by virtue of its treatment of mathematics and
mathematical entities, at best, as objects of philosophical (or, as we should say here,
pedagogical) thought. Such a static and reductively instrumental snapshot effectuation of
a discipline far, far stranger indeed elides its implication within a broadened conception
of subjectivity as Badiou would have it. Perhaps analogically one might compare the
absence of scandal so obvious with regard to the teaching of mathematics adequate to
accounting to the one to be expected (one would hope) should language arts be taught
sufficient only to journalism. Little style thinking of mathematics authorizes and
perpetuates a broad acquiescence, one which Badiou reads into a substantial ontological
and ethical edifice.
In the grand style of thought about the relation between mathematics and
philosophy however, mathematics provides direct illumination of philosophy, rather
than the opposite (p. 7). Here mathematics is an absolutely indispensable condition for
philosophy as such (p. 14) for it expounds the thinkable without thematizing it (p.
46)a crucial, if difficult, determination. Badiou traces the effects of the grand style
through a number of eminent thinkers who share the proclivity of giving thanks to
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rigorous mathematics (p. 14) for reasons completely disassociated with the field in
most of its educational incarnations:
It doesnt matter whether philosophy is conceived of as a rationalism tied
to transcendence, as it is from Descartes to Lacan; as a vitalist
immanentism, as it is from Spinoza to Deleuze; as pious criticism, as it is
from Kant to Ricoeur; as a dialectic of the absolute, as it is from Hegel to
Mao Zedong; or as an aestheticist creationism, as it is from Lautramont
to Neitzsche. For the founders of each of these lineages, it still remains
the case that the cold radicality of mathematics is the necessary exercise
through which is forged a thinking subject adequate to the transformations
he will be forced to undergo. (p. 14-15)
This cold radicality, while a chilly breeze indeed to the anxieties of educations
impossible charge, is one however proper to a condition, a being, a thinking not content
with its conceptual comforts, which strays into the vastness of the foreign terrain of the
next moment sans papiers. There is no reason education is not obliged to read itself into
such difficulties, although to do so is surely within what Deborah Britzman (2009, July
14) advises, that we figuratively will have to destroy education to create education.
As the historical development of the theory of multiplicities (Badiou, 2006b,
para. 22), mathematics unique prism of concepts in becomes for Badiou (2006a) our
obligation, our alteration (p. 15), one Badiou regards is as scandalously neglected in
contemporary philosophy. Philosophy, or its particular vocation for thinking about
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thinking, has no difficulty, especially since Heidegger, in deploying the poetic, in notable
contrast to the scant mathematical, a mistake Badiou clearly crusades against. Thus he
squarely locates himself within the grand style of thought, wherein, for him,
mathematics is always more or less equivalent to the bulldozer with which we remove
the rubble that prevents us from constructing edifices in the open air (p. 17). Not one to
decry the heroic gesture, nor certainly trifle needlessly with a modest one (though
ultimately, we could say, his thought is self-sundering, removing itself from the position
of arbitrator among thought and its worlds, for it lays no claims itself to truth), he
declaims the project from which we derive present considerations:
by donning the contemporary matheme like a coat of armorI have
undertaken, alone at first, to undo the disastrous consequences of
philosophys linguistic turn; to demarcate philosophy from
phenomenological religiosity; to re-found the metaphysical triad for being,
event and subject; to take a stand against poetic prophesying; to identify
generic multiplicities as the ontological form of the true; to assign a place
to Lacanian formalism; and, more recently, to articulate the logic of
appearing. (p. 17)
One wonders what he eats for breakfast. Regardless, we may say in concluding this
preface to the kernel of Badious contribution to the grand style of thinking this relation
that it clearly is not contemplating the mathematics most of us learn in school. There is
no reason I can see, however, that that particular venue for mathematical thinking should
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be denied what Badiou calls these luscious jungle flora (p. 6) which he retrieves from
Platothough its insinuation is surely via trajectories of a sort of Foucauldian resistance.
That the mathematical intuition be coupled, and even indispensable to, the
philosophical, the pedagogical and even the democratic could be considered a reason for
celebration of new vistas to think from (though I should add the caveat that democracy
for Badiou is a sort of disciplining ideology of the first order, a sort of handmaiden of
capital which he critiques without reservation). This is a curious and most unaccustomed
passage into the realm beyond the foreclosures of the arid instrumentality and orderly
pragmatics of mathematics more commonly entertained. It is mathematics re-inscription
within questions of being and truth, as unique and authoritative access to novelty. I
would suggest that Badious sweeping and re-historicizing reconsideration of
mathematics and philosophy indicates the beginning of the end of the formers exile as
superordinate and obliquely authoritative curriculum outlier. No longer that familiar
stranger of the apex and the middle, revered, feared and know to few, a dangerous
knowledge effaced via reductive pedagogical recapitulations and indulgent prejudices
against thought itself, this is mathematics which belongs, and invariably locates its
subjects within, a sort of eternity. This reconsideration also forcibly redirects
mathematics toward a fruitful conversation with other instances of pedagogical thought
with which fresh dialogues become possible. Perhaps intimated by many whose
education may not have been entirely eclipsed by schooling in the little style, this
mathematical philosophy, this ontology, is something Alain Badiou is at exhaustive great
pains to elaborate in some considerable precision.
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For Badiou the impossible (in that it is in- or non-sensible) figure of the pure
multiple, and the proper name of being, is the void. It is a domain of objects (rather than
of a concept) not accessible through the ruinous image of the mere calculation or
technique (p. 36) imagined by the little style, but rather through a thinkings evacuation
of every tutelary figure of the One (p. 39). Its incision is enacted (or thought, more
properly) by way of axiomatic decisionin modern set theory of Cantor, and thereafter of
Zermelo and Fraenkel, Von Neumann and Gdel, working from the late nineteenth
century through the middle of the twentieth. In approaching the voids infinity nearby
(p. 19) as Badiou calls it, the choices with which we are presented lie among definition
and axiom, principle and decision, unification and dissemination (p. 50). The
delocalization of set theoretical ontology presents an approach that remains fluid and
indecisive (p. 50) and, to sustain the movement of thought, its intuition (the axiomatic
decision) must periodically be re-decided (p. 55). It is an agentic happening, not a
passive reception. It, and the ceaseless processes of fidelity it inspires, must always be
thought anew. From Mallarm, Badiou calls it a wager, this fidelity to a thinking
without object.
Perhaps ironically, given set theorys rigorous formulaics, this asceticism, this
instance of philosophy humbling itself, against its own latent wishes (p. 50) is also the
liberation of thought. Subsisting at the rift between thought and the freedom of thought,
Badious invocation of set theorys subtraction from the metaphorical register of the
tendency, the horizon, becoming (p. 38) is the precise movement of thoughts liberation
from its own self-imprisonment, the breaking of its own mirror. In mathematics we
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rediscover no less than the human history of eternity (p. 40). The hallmark question
thought asks in Badious grand style is: Do we notice it? (p. 21)
But what is there to notice? For present purposes I will confine myself (in no
small measure on account of mathematical incapacity, or perhaps little stylization) to
the matter of the ubiquity of the null set, by which set theory in Badious argument
thinks beings inclusionas the unpresentable voidin every situation. Beginning, as
I myself had hoped to, with the expulsion of any presentifying assumption of being
(Badiou, 2007, p. 67), we find in the null or void set what Badiou calls the subtractive
suture to being (p. 66). This is that which never belongs, but is always included, void of
all totality, a multiple which is not under the idea of the multiple (as we have seen as any
of the other, difference or the plural). For Badiou this is decisively not a metaphor which
might allegorically be applied to, for example, a democratic ethics. It is rather the
situation from which such ethics may be thought and re-thought (as what Badiou calls a
truth process and a matter of a fidelity from which is foundeda subject). This is a key
distinction in Badious thought, one indicated in what he calls our maxim, that
philosophy must enter into logic via mathematics, not into mathematics via logic
(2006a, p. 16). Some of what Badiou calls the welcome consequences of this trajectory
of thoughtthrough its own axiomatic subtractionare a new entre into the freedom of
thought (beyond finitude), a new conception of the subject and a new concept of the
new itself. In these venues a great deal is at stake. Will education notice?
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The Void and the New
Salman Rushdie, in his Satanic Verses (1988), evokes the pertinent question with
this verse:
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what
deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the
exterminating angel, the guillotine?
Is a birth always a fall?
Do angels have wings? Can men fly? (p. 8)
At this point, it is necessary to consider how, in the thought of Alain Badiou, one
is to consider the question of the new, as indicated by the earlier allusion to his
preoccupation with a logic of change. Certainly for education it may be seen as a very
central question to the aspirations of an educative sensibility.
I have touched on the matter of the void to some extent already, and may here
again characterize it as an immanent infinity, a multiplicity that is pure in that it consists
only in ever more multiples, and a constitutive exclusion in every situation (clear here is
Badious debt to Lacan). For Badiou, the void, while certainly comprising the suture
of beings omnipresent subtraction, also consists in what he calls a situations evental
site. This is the place where something decisive can happen in a situation, in which an
event can take place (Hallward, 2004, p. 8). An event reveals the insufficiency of
categorizations and defies the obsessive attempts to codify newness as knowledge. The
void is the vanishing point in every configuration (every one as we have seen) which
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interjects by way of a transformation an interruption from within the subsistence of the
chaos of pure multiplicity. This is both the new and the commencement of a truth:
truth is, first of all, something new (Badiou, 2005, p. 45); it cannot be thought as one
linkage within a larger unified machinery such as evolution or complexity or chaos
(p. 14). Badiou argues that a fidelity to truth (which he conceives as a process founded
by an event) requires from within the circulation of language and thought a principal of
interruption, one however expressly opposed to mere polyvalence of meaning
(Badiou, 2005, p. 50) of figures of narrative. This principal affords and cultivates a
disposition toward truth, it in fact is the first order of a subject to truth, or a new
subjectivity, a subjectivity to the new. An event at once indicates that things do not need
to be the way they are (Fiskin, 2005) and compels us to decide a new way of being, as a
decision of the undecidable, or the wager of a truth:
For the process of truth to begin, something must happen. What there
already isthe situation of knowledge as suchgenerates nothing other
than repetition. For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a
supplement. This supplement is committed to chance. It is unpredictable,
incalculable. It is beyond what is. I call it an event. A truth thus appears,
in its newness, because an evental supplement interrupts repetition
(Badiou, 2005, p. 46)
As an address from within a situation, nothing, in a sense (and certainly in a word), could
be more easy to miss than an eventwhose nature it is to defy intelligibility. It is
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undecidable, that is, not recognizable to any given order, it subsists, or in-sists, in
disappearing ephemera:
an event itself is always a perfect weakness. It is such because the being
of an event is to disappear; the being of an event is disappearing. The
event is nothingjust sort of illumination (p. 140).
I am reminded of how black holes are detected, by inference from implication. What is
illuminated for Badiou is that the situation is in a sense madeof the void, this in turn, by
virtue of the de-localization of identification resonant among void, event and subject,
indicates a new way to be: the implications of an eventmake it impossible for those
who affirm them to carry on as before (Hallward, 2004, p. 3). This carrying on
differently is the very call by which philosophy responds to the world, by way of a
decision uniquely to be faithful to the transformation (Badiou, 2005, p. 130). I might
add, by way of biographic aside, that Badiou identifies the event of the Paris spring of
1968 as an event to which he owes some of his subjectivityof the singular and
momentary conjoining of workers and students in a new configuration of resistance, and
all that this irruption has spawned, and spawns since, in the situation France and
beyond. It is interesting to see how the new for Badiou presents itself as a problem to be
affirmed, and thus a truth process to be embarked upon:
I have had a living experiment of what is something absolutely new and a
vivid experience of when something happens, the very nature of which is
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novelty, you have something like the birth of a new subject. And I
experiment first this point in my life and only after I had to create the
concepts to justify and clarify this point. So I go to the concept of an
event by thinking that when something really happens you always have a
real rupture. You have the creation of a new subject and you have the
process of continuation of the subject as such. Finally, we have in fact
three fundamental concepts: event, subject and fidelity, fidelity being the
name for the continuation of the existence of the process of the new
subject (Badiou, 2006b, para. 25)
The important movement for educative purposes is here that from void to event to new
subject. An explication of Badious (2005) mathematical meta-ontology leads us to a sort
of fidelity always leaking into infinity as it resituates itself in the language it is
compelled to convene. Always innovating within and against its own innovation, fidelity
to event creates a subject anew, in the re-decision of the meaning of the events from
which it arose. There is certainly a militancy, and even a sort of violence to Badious
truth process. It is a conceptual violence, a dangerous thinkingfor Badiou (2006c) not
to resist is not to think (p. 17)in this subtraction toward pure multiplicity and not, as
we have seen, to a totalitys myriad chimerical instantiations. This thinking, this ethics
we might say, obtains similarly (for the void is generic) in each of what Badiou identifies
as the domains of truth procedures, art, science, politics and love, whose elaboration may
only be intimated here, in consideration of the new who Badious conception of the
event summons us to be.
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A New Subjectivity
We find ourselves at a moment when the question of the educative sensibility may
most fruitfully arise. What are moments in the life of an educator, or in the historicity of
the concept of education, or in the orders of schooling which might be evental? Despite
the fact that the void from which they sprang is, for none of us will the answers be the
same. There are however some similarities perhaps to how an educator can profess an
ethics inspired by Alain Badiou.
Clearly, again we find in this profession a different conception of mathematics to
the one to which most of us were introduced. It is instead one which thinks, which thinks
our condition in its widest remit in fact, instead of the other way around. To notice this it
to be thought by it, to be a subject to that truth, as Badiou might say. Next, we surely
have the ceaseless imperative to always reinvent how we describe our world. The
inclusion of the voids subtraction in every situation exposes eachs unique contingency.
There can be no repetition that escapes the void, for all is constituted in part by it. Even
if such consists in the voids denial, its vanishing point indicates its contingencya
denial (typically in the figure of a necessity) ever more fierce the more it is threatened
(Badiou calls this denial terror). I should add that this enclosure, whether by the
presumed adequation of knowledge to object, implied completion of all that may be said
or even disavowal of the precarious resources of language, is what Badiou terms evil.
To the educative sensibility one must also admit from Badious oeuvre a
commitment to foster a sort of creative messianism without image. This recognizes, and
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flows from the recognition of, the self as subject, or to be subject to an unnameable
rupture which must thence always be attested anew, a wager on the credit of the future
anterior. This is a conception of a being that includes the conjecture that this is what I
will have been. In affirming the singularity of the evental supplement, one is double as
such, or doubled. This self-splitting may be thought to be the nexus of conscience. This
ethics certainly cannot be taught (look, the void!) but it likely can be indicated,
embodied, exemplified as implicate if not presumed ever known. It is a condition of risk
whose grace is being, and whose possibility is possibility itself. Democracy is thought in
perpetual renewal of itself, heterodox in the chasm between what belongs and what may
be included, and thus becomes an affirmation which forever needs new words, and the
words of the newand always an astute distancing from all forms of dogma. Art is the
faithful companion who indicates, but cannot contain in expression, that to which it
alludes (Badiou (2005) argues extensively against Heidegger and with Lacoue-Labarthe
for the retraction of the mytheme as ontologically authoritative (p. 71), and also, and
without contradiction, for the indispensability of the poem to philosophy). Science is its
frontiers again (and not their technicization), disappearing in a joyous and severe
convocation before its own majestic concept and tatterdemalion formalities. And love
remains its own artesian enigma, the frail isthmus where the one becomes two. Marquez
(1989) recalls to us simply the particular perils of the truth of loves fidelity: nothing in
this world is more difficult than love (p. 270). Fidelity is no stranger to difficulty,
wherever truth is to be found.
Finally we are left, fatigued perhaps, but I hope not exhausted, with exhortations,
incitements of a profession not lost to the qualifications of its romantic obscurity, one in
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search always of a new vocabulary of possibility. There is something distinctly
Promethian in the challenge: Do all you can to persevere in that which exceeds your
perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized
and broken you (Dews, 2004, p. 117). The question remains of what we may consist
adequate to what we undergo, as we fly from darkness to darkness following what
precedes us. Badiou (2005) remains optimisticeverything remains to be invented
(Badiou as cited in Toscano, 2004, p. 149)as he calls philosophy to Get up and walk!
(p. 42) in responding to the worlds demand of it.
I hope it has become apparent that one can go a long way from nowhere. It is, in
fact, what permits one to follow Parmenides without destination or conclusion, to be, in a
sense, what one must. This is an ethic which carries no fare for a great elsewhere, but
insists always and again on the renewed immanence of an infinity nearby, propelled
within what Alain Badiou (2006a) calls the only maxim required in ethics and with
which I draw these considerations to a undoubtedly rousing, but also somewhat tentative
conclusion: Keep going! (p. 17).
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Works Cited
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Continuum).
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York: Continuum).
Badiou, A. (2006b) Ours is Not a Terrible Situation. Interview with Simon Critchley
March 6, 2006. Accessed from www. slought.org on June 14, 2008.
Badiou, A. (2006c) Metapolitics (Brooklyn: Verso Press).
Badiou, A. (2007) Being and Event. Oliver Feltham, Trans. (New York: Continuum).
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