Theory & Event

Exactly who is Alain Badiou? His name is being mentioned with increasing frequency amongst English-speaking theorists. Slavoj Zizek publicly proclaims that he is the next major philosophical figure emerging from France after Derrida. But, despite this, only three of his many books — Badiou has been steadily publishing since the late 1960s — have been translated: Deleuze, Ethics, and Manifesto for Philosophy. Most problematically, his sizeable magnum opus, L’Être et l’événement (Being and the Event), remains untranslated. And, up until now, no comprehensive introduction to his work has been available in English. Jason Barker’s overview of Alain Badiou’s thought is thus a timely text placed in a position where it will almost certainly influence discussions of Badiou in the near future due to it’s being the first lengthy piece of secondary literature in English on this interesting thinker.

Barker begins the book by summarizing Badiou’s intellectual itinerary and, in the first chapter, sketching a picture of his philosophical beginnings as a Maoist student of the French Marxist Louis Althusser. Given his background, one might expect that Badiou would resemble other well-known thinkers who are part of the generation that matured in the continental European context surrounding the May ‘68 events, namely, those authors closely associated with post-structuralism and post-modernism. Instead, when reading Badiou one encounters someone virulently opposed to nearly all of the central tenets he associates with the “new sophists” (i.e., those promoting a sort of pervasive relativism inspired by such influences as Nietzsche, Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and the hermeneutic/linguistic turn dominating twentieth-century philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic). Pushing off against this pervasive sophistical relativism, Badiou provocatively dubs himself a “Platonist.” What could he mean? Why would anyone embrace a paradigm that has fallen into such widespread disrepute?

For Badiou, being a Platonist signifies, first and foremost, affirming an idea of truth as timeless and universal. Contemporary philosophy is underwritten by a series of possible permutations for denying this affirmation: truth doesn’t exist; truth is the illusory effect of social, historical, and economic constructions; truth is relative to the symbolic-linguistic systems framing it; truth is a fictional tool manipulated by power mechanisms ... and so on and so forth. Of course, critical readings of Plato often point out that the standards for “truth” articulated by Socrates in the dialogues are borrowed directly from the then-novel discovery of mathematical and geometrical laws. The insinuation is, obviously, that a particular knowledge-domain from the ancient Greek world is arbitrarily elevated into a general, overarching standard for all thought. Rather than defend Platonism in the style of an apologist by downplaying the references to Pythagorean themes, Badiou happily affirms the central role of mathematics in both epistemology and, even more controversially, the formulation of a genuine ontology. However, the mathematics that Badiou employs in his endeavor to revive Platonism, as well as the supposed “Platonism” resulting from this exercise, wouldn’t be known or recognized by Plato (in the field of mathematics, Badiou’s principle point of reference is set theory, especially as developed by Georg Cantor). Barker succeeds in conveying the basic gist of Badiou’s system without getting mired in lengthy explanations of the mathematical ideas employed by Badiou, ideas with which most of his reading audience probably isn’t acquainted. However, for those interested, Barker includes a short appendix at the end of the book listing the axioms of set theory that are crucial for grasping the notions at stake here.

According to Badiou, everything that can be said to exist is also, necessarily, “numerable,” that is, subsumable under the laws of mathematics or capable of being “counted” as part of a purely formal language. At first, this might sound like nothing more than an explicit version of the implicit ontology spontaneously secreted by the natural sciences, grounded, as these sciences are, by physics: since all material entities, ranging from the smallest microscopic organisms to the largest clusters of galaxies, are composed of atoms and sub-atomic particles — and since these microscopic constituents of...