This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Oct 2007, by Jonathan Milburn.
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01 May 10
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01 May 08
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the undecidable event
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So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew
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17 Oct 07
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particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria
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increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan.
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University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought
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fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard,
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he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a "scientific" Marxism
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Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan
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"L'Organisation Politique"
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Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of the poor in countries like India and in the Democratic Republic of Congo & South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.
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Badiou being labelled Anti-Semitic
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show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique
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he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery
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philosophy takes place under four conditions (Art, Love, Politics, and Science)
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in the sense that they produce philosophical truths
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truth procedures
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philosophy must avoid the temptation to attach its own truth to that of any of the discourses, a process he terms a philosophical "disaster
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'points of suture', or places of exceptional connection between the truths
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'inaesthetic' to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation"
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Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of 'nature', Badiou claims that art is 'immanent' and 'singular'
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truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art,
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truth is found in art and art alone
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frequent criticism of post structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject.
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break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language,
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straitjacket
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while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one.
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that the one is not.
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the Ideas of the multiple
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the very place of ontology:
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their structural relation
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So if one is to think of a set — for instance, the set of people, or humanity — as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple (the multiplicities of humans) as one consistent concept (humanity), but only in terms of what does not belong to that set.
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the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable,
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a multiple is not one, but it is referred to with 'multiple':
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a term 'existing'
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the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation and not an event of truth
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Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation
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is not just illustrative or heuristic.
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to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God
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a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic
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This paradox can be thought through in terms of a 'list of lists that do not contain themselves'
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two major implications from this prohibition.
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it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching se
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it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God
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this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event
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the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets
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effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence
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it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically
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ontology can say nothing about the event.
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either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology (the criticism continually leveled at Foucault's discursive universe), or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion
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Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory
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He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets
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every discernible (nameable or constructible) set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set
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The property 'one' is always dominated by 'not one'.)
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It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing.
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while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject — about which the ontological situation cannot comment — to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event.
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Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.
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ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set
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He identifies four domains by which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.
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politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the 'evental' (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew
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his concept of the event
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but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability
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How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand — ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?
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