Online research in philosophy

Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty presents a new account of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, identifying conceptual impasses in their philosophical ...

Machine generated contents note: Notes on Contributors. -- Foreword (Michael A. Peters). -- Introduction: Alain Badiou: 'Becoming subject' to education (Kent den Heyer). -- 1. Badiou, Pedagogy and the Arts (Thomas E. Peterson). -- 2. Badiou's Challenge to Art and its Education: Or, 'art cannot be taught--it can however educate!' (Jan Jagodzinski). -- 3. Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan and the Ethics of Teaching (Peter M. Taubman). -- 4. Reconceptualizing Professional Development for Curriculum Leadership: Inspired by John Dewey and informed by Alain Badiou (Kathleen R. Kesson and James G. Henderson). -- 5. The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St. Paul and the question of economic managerialism in education (Anna Strhan). -- 6. Militants of Truth, Communities of Equality: Badiou and the ignorant schoolmaster (Charles Andrew Barbour). -- Index.

With his mathematically based theory of subjectivity, ontology, phenomenology and the advent of the new, Alain Badiou has produced a systematic reflection on forms and formalisms that is dramatic in its consequences and unparalleled in our time. In the contemporary context, one of the most innovative and courageous aspects of this rigorous reflection on forms is Badiou‟s unyielding insistence on the reality and value of truth in structuring the very possibility of novelty and progressive change. This insistence yields Badiou‟s clearsighted critical recognition of the ultimate untenability of the dominant “postmodern” position that sees behind truth-claims only contingent power struggles and local situations.

This review takes seriously Badiou's use of set theory and mathematics, explaining the book's subtle technical content while maintaining a critical distance on Badiou's interpretative views.

In his magnum opus Being and Event, Alain Badiou identifies ontology with mathematics and uses a mathematical formalization of ontological discourse to generate an account of extra-ontological 'truth-events'. Informed by deconstructive critiques of the metaphysical ontologies of presence, Badiou establishes an anti-phenomenological conception of ontological presentation. Presentation's internal structure is that of an anti-phenomenon: presence's necessarily empty and insubstantial contrary. But the result is that Being and Event is riven by a fundamental methodological idealism. Badiou cannot secure the connection he wishes to establish between the formal discursive structure of mathematical ontology and extra-discursive reality. The decisive link between being and event, i.e. between Badiou's purely formal conception of ontological presentation and the extra-ontological reality of the event, is precluded by the very structure of the concept of presentation which is central to Badiou's argument.

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works (especially 2006’s Logiques des mondes), Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one” (compter-pour-un). The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through.

The following essay sets out the background developments in mathematics and set theory that inform Alain Badiou’s Being and Event in order to provide some context both for the original text and for comment on Chris Norris’s excellent exploration of Badiou’s work. I also provide a summary of Badiou’s overall approach.

This volume, assembled with the collaboration of the author, presents for the first time in English a comprehensive outline of Badiou's ambitious system.