What do you think?
Rate this book
Being and Event
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 an English-speaking readership Badiou's groundbreaking work on set theory - the cornerstone of his whole philosophy. This book makes the scope and aim of Badiou's whole philosophical project clear, enabling full comprehension of Badiou's significance for contemporary philosophy. In Being and Event, Badiou anchors this project by recasting the European philosophical tradition from Plato onwards, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Rousseau, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a history of philosophy rivalling those of Heidegger and Deleuze in its depth. This wide-ranging book is organized in a precise and novel manner, reflecting the philosophical rigour of Badiou's thought. The English language edition includes a new preface, written especially for this translation.
Alain Badiou teaches at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works.
Alain Badiou teaches at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works.
526 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
136 people are currently reading
4365 people want to read
About the author
Alain Badiou
364 books1,001 followersAlain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
May 5, 2009
This is an extraordinarily embarrassing book, which uses the language and trappings of mathematics to cover a core of nonsense with a veneer of formal rigor. I read this because (I now realize) my filters against the Social Text crowd of neolatin portmanteau abusers (the kind of people who are making up new words to describe their application of quantum mechanics to ethics, when their understanding of quantum mechanics extends exactly as far as a reading of A Brief History of Time can get you) were just not tight enough. Badiou's nonsense is sometimes put into context with the work of the brilliant Saul Kripke, and I made the mistake of taking this at face value. The difference between the two thinkers is a yawning gulf. Between the beginning and the end of a paper by Kripke on set theory is an actual, meaningful contribution to set theory. The ontological implications, when they are there, are necessary: you can actually get there from here.
In contrast, again and again with Badiou, there are all these pseudomathematical meanderings involving set theory, but at base the man is just making some intuitive leaps and then merely explicating them with a symbolic vocabulary that looks like ZFC and some first-order logic. But it's all really arbitrary; you could just as sensibly describe the world with the language of cooking ("the world is like a stew!" wait, no, wrong tone, let me try again: "Reality is stew. The supplementation of meat is impossible; there is only the interplay of meat and carrot"). In the end you would have a complete system with exactly the same value as Badiou's. And in just the same way, your stew-based ontological grounding would be filled with all sorts of interesting relationships and implications, because once you set up the metaphor, all kinds of relationships inherent to the metaphor could be identified and imbued with meaning as though justifying its application to reality: the movement of the broth, like human endeavor, is a chaotic system! fluid dynamics is predictable in the short term, but chaos theory shows us that we can never predict the future reliably! etc.
As it happens, there may be some utility to thinking about human interaction in terms of the fluid dynamics of broth, with sheer force, turbulence, the butterfly effect, etc. But that doesn't mean my cooking-based ontological grounding is any good. By using the special symbolic vocabulary of mathematics, Badiou obscures this fact and gets to float on a wave of intellectual dishonesty that naturally brings to mind The Emperor's New Clothes.
Or to wrap this all up in fewer words: when you see someone lumping Leibniz and Lacan, for goodness' sake, together, just roll your eyes and move on.
In contrast, again and again with Badiou, there are all these pseudomathematical meanderings involving set theory, but at base the man is just making some intuitive leaps and then merely explicating them with a symbolic vocabulary that looks like ZFC and some first-order logic. But it's all really arbitrary; you could just as sensibly describe the world with the language of cooking ("the world is like a stew!" wait, no, wrong tone, let me try again: "Reality is stew. The supplementation of meat is impossible; there is only the interplay of meat and carrot"). In the end you would have a complete system with exactly the same value as Badiou's. And in just the same way, your stew-based ontological grounding would be filled with all sorts of interesting relationships and implications, because once you set up the metaphor, all kinds of relationships inherent to the metaphor could be identified and imbued with meaning as though justifying its application to reality: the movement of the broth, like human endeavor, is a chaotic system! fluid dynamics is predictable in the short term, but chaos theory shows us that we can never predict the future reliably! etc.
As it happens, there may be some utility to thinking about human interaction in terms of the fluid dynamics of broth, with sheer force, turbulence, the butterfly effect, etc. But that doesn't mean my cooking-based ontological grounding is any good. By using the special symbolic vocabulary of mathematics, Badiou obscures this fact and gets to float on a wave of intellectual dishonesty that naturally brings to mind The Emperor's New Clothes.
Or to wrap this all up in fewer words: when you see someone lumping Leibniz and Lacan, for goodness' sake, together, just roll your eyes and move on.
June 9, 2009
Let us imagine the plight of a naive reader who comes to us (because we, for the sake of argument, are people who appear to "know something of philosophy") and says, "I am interested in reading some philosophy because I know philosophers are people who try to grapple with the things of the world in thought, and it seems useful to be acquainted with that sort of thing, but I just find it so difficult! Philosophers are always referring in cryptic ways to other philosophers and using specialized language and I am never sure that they are even discussing things that are relevant to my life at all! It makes my head spin! For example, I hear that to understand Hegel, one must first understand Kant, and to understand Kant one should be acquainted with Hume, which necessitates a knowledge of Descartes, and to know what any of them are talking about requires familiarity with Plato and Aristotle! I don't have the time or the discipline to study the entire history of philosophy, and I can't read everything all at once, so what do I do?"
We could perhaps be helpful by responding thus, "I understand what you mean! Becoming acquainted with a philosophical vocabulary is a time consuming and often thankless process. Nonetheless, it is helpful to realize that philosophical thought is always grappling with the world in a particular context and from a certain historical juncture. It is usually easier to read and understand things that are closer to our own context, more in tune with our own zeitgeist, if you will. Therefore I recommend that you find the one serious philosophical treatise that is most contemporaneous and work your way through it as a starting point. Not only will such a procedure more likely convince you of philosophy's applicability and relevance to contemporary life, but it will also show you what remains useful and relevant in the philosophical tradition, which remains available should you want to pursue it further."
Being and Event is the major philosophical treatise of our time. If Heidegger was the philosopher of the twentieth century (and Hegel of the nineteenth, Kant of the eighteenth, and so forth) then Alain Badiou is the philosopher for the early twenty-first century, and Being and Event his magnum opus, the foundation of his philosophical system. Any exploration of Badiou's thought (which is to say, that which philosophy has to offer for the twenty-first century) should begin with this book, which works out in systematic terms Badiou's fundamental ontology (hint: it's mathematics), and offers a retrieve and reinterpretation of the previous philosophical tradition as ambitious as Heidegger's.
Everyone even vaguely interested in contemporary philosophy owes it to themselves to get acquainted with this book, even though it may be a little difficult, especially if your grasp of mathematics is weak (though anybody who made it through geometry and advanced algebra in high school should be just fine). It is a work that requires a little persistence and patience, though such efforts will be more than amply rewarded in the end.
Or as Slavoj Zizek (one who, if anything else, could at least be said to be someone who knows something of philosophy) has said: "Read [Badiou:] with the proper tremor, aware that you are reading a classic, that a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!"
We could perhaps be helpful by responding thus, "I understand what you mean! Becoming acquainted with a philosophical vocabulary is a time consuming and often thankless process. Nonetheless, it is helpful to realize that philosophical thought is always grappling with the world in a particular context and from a certain historical juncture. It is usually easier to read and understand things that are closer to our own context, more in tune with our own zeitgeist, if you will. Therefore I recommend that you find the one serious philosophical treatise that is most contemporaneous and work your way through it as a starting point. Not only will such a procedure more likely convince you of philosophy's applicability and relevance to contemporary life, but it will also show you what remains useful and relevant in the philosophical tradition, which remains available should you want to pursue it further."
Being and Event is the major philosophical treatise of our time. If Heidegger was the philosopher of the twentieth century (and Hegel of the nineteenth, Kant of the eighteenth, and so forth) then Alain Badiou is the philosopher for the early twenty-first century, and Being and Event his magnum opus, the foundation of his philosophical system. Any exploration of Badiou's thought (which is to say, that which philosophy has to offer for the twenty-first century) should begin with this book, which works out in systematic terms Badiou's fundamental ontology (hint: it's mathematics), and offers a retrieve and reinterpretation of the previous philosophical tradition as ambitious as Heidegger's.
Everyone even vaguely interested in contemporary philosophy owes it to themselves to get acquainted with this book, even though it may be a little difficult, especially if your grasp of mathematics is weak (though anybody who made it through geometry and advanced algebra in high school should be just fine). It is a work that requires a little persistence and patience, though such efforts will be more than amply rewarded in the end.
Or as Slavoj Zizek (one who, if anything else, could at least be said to be someone who knows something of philosophy) has said: "Read [Badiou:] with the proper tremor, aware that you are reading a classic, that a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!"
February 21, 2022
badiou understands me. i love u alain. i’d give u a big wet sloppy kiss on your droopy old lips for this book.
May 25, 2012
Unquestionably the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century. Being and Event can best be described as an existentialism of the multiple. As a matter of fact, the book essentially states that there is no such thing as the individual, the singular. Badiou has attempted a herculean effort of formalizing a definition of ontology and all aspects of the moment using the mathematic language of set theory. In so doing, some truly amazing implications and insights are gleaned from the very nature of existence both real and virtual from this depiction. There is little fault to be found in this treatise; although like any major work, the commitment and mental stamina necessary to digest this are great.
Being and Event is a book of several meditations on the intersection of existence and its inevitable interplay in the social described in the symbolism of set theory and its axioms. Badiou starts from the basic proofs and translates them into the language of ontology creating an ever larger conceptual framework and along the way extracting insights on the notion of nothingness, the divine, revolution, social democracy, and the very fabric of reality. That said, these extractions are never explicitly stated, as such. In many cases the proof is established, its opaque translation is provided in fairly technical language and the reader is left to contemplate the implication. At the end of each section, a certain philosopher's formulation of ontology is compared to the complexity building in the ever-expanding framework. As philosophical innovation progressed through epistemology, so does the framework of Badiou's comparison. That is to say, the timeline of philosophy coincides neatly with the level of complexity associated with the conceptual development of set theory. We start with Aristotle and end with Lacan meeting the likes of Descartes and Pascal as well as Cantor along the way.
This is not for the drive-by philosopher. I cannot stress the necessary level of commitment to accept this book. I made the mistake of wondering away from it towards the final few meditations (of course at this point the level of complexity in the proofs was high) and so just picking this back up is not a trivial task. Even with the amount of concentration I dedicated to this book, I still know I need to return to this again. For now, I need to decompress after considering the depth of this book.
Being and Event is a book of several meditations on the intersection of existence and its inevitable interplay in the social described in the symbolism of set theory and its axioms. Badiou starts from the basic proofs and translates them into the language of ontology creating an ever larger conceptual framework and along the way extracting insights on the notion of nothingness, the divine, revolution, social democracy, and the very fabric of reality. That said, these extractions are never explicitly stated, as such. In many cases the proof is established, its opaque translation is provided in fairly technical language and the reader is left to contemplate the implication. At the end of each section, a certain philosopher's formulation of ontology is compared to the complexity building in the ever-expanding framework. As philosophical innovation progressed through epistemology, so does the framework of Badiou's comparison. That is to say, the timeline of philosophy coincides neatly with the level of complexity associated with the conceptual development of set theory. We start with Aristotle and end with Lacan meeting the likes of Descartes and Pascal as well as Cantor along the way.
This is not for the drive-by philosopher. I cannot stress the necessary level of commitment to accept this book. I made the mistake of wondering away from it towards the final few meditations (of course at this point the level of complexity in the proofs was high) and so just picking this back up is not a trivial task. Even with the amount of concentration I dedicated to this book, I still know I need to return to this again. For now, I need to decompress after considering the depth of this book.
November 15, 2022
Like all great works of philosophy, Badiou’s Being and Event is a wager. A wager on the possibility of Events, of ruptures in the weave of things, both personal and political, staking itself there where the possibility of a better world shines like a light through the crack in things. This much, I think, is known even by those with a passing familiarity of Badiou, whose association with the theme of the Event has been at the heart of the philosopher that he is. Nonetheless, what seems to go often unremarked in glosses on Badiou’s philosophy is the rigor to which devotes himself to the question of - not the break of the Event, but the continuum of Being. Indeed, what is utterly striking in Being and Event is the attention given to continuity, and the attempt to think the discontinuous solely by means of taking continuity itself to the limit.
It is a little unorthodox, perhaps, to focus on the ‘Being’ side of Being and Event, and in some ways, it’s compensatory on my part on account of the inattention usually given to it. But it’s only by giving continuity - and thence Being - its full due, that the distinctness, not only of the Event, but of Badiou’s philosophy itself can be put into proper relief. After all, it is this and only this that explains the otherwise startling choice to identify - as Badiou does in perhaps his absolutely signature move - mathematics as nothing less than the discourse of ontology as such. It is mathematics, that is, that speaks Being, that is the discourse most adequate to its expression and its study by the otherwise finite 'configurations' that we (only sometimes, according to Badiou) are. And this to the extent that it is mathematics that is most suited to the study of the continuous, given the austere explicitness of its operations.
Or to put it otherwise, what is distinct about mathematics is its ability to a-count (quite literally) for itself. All that happens in mathematics follows from the 'monotony' (Badiou's word) of its deductions, such that every step can be discerned, without ambiguity, from the last. What better than this investigation, operating 'without gaps', for the study of the continuous? But more importantly still - what better investigation to find, at its limit, what cannot be accounted for by this most rigorous formulation of continuity? And there lies the nub of Badiou's project: the effort to use math, as it were, against itself; to find, by mathematical means alone, the symptomatic points at which math itself gives way to what exceeds it, not from without, but from within. Hence, to take just one of these points: the study of infinity, so important here, which in the wake of Cantor, explodes outwards into an infinity of infinities, an index of the 'errancy of the quantitative', unmasterable on its terms.
To say all this - so much already - is to give nothing but the most minimal outline of the programme within, which is rich, far too rich, for any pithy summary as this to capture. While I've focused on the math - for me the most intriguing - it's also the case that at stake in all this is the realignment of the very possibilities of philosophy itself. For, by staking ontology on a discourse 'without concept' (i.e. math), the very privilege of the concept, for so long sovereign over philosophy, is here called into question - and with it, the past and future of what philosophy has been, and will be. If at least that past is addressed here too (in the guise of readings of Aristotle, Hegel, Leibniz, Pascal and others, alongside the math, and alongside the poets, who I've completely neglected), the philosophical future itself can only be radically other in the wake - don't make me say it, I have to say it - of the Event, of Being and Event.
It is a little unorthodox, perhaps, to focus on the ‘Being’ side of Being and Event, and in some ways, it’s compensatory on my part on account of the inattention usually given to it. But it’s only by giving continuity - and thence Being - its full due, that the distinctness, not only of the Event, but of Badiou’s philosophy itself can be put into proper relief. After all, it is this and only this that explains the otherwise startling choice to identify - as Badiou does in perhaps his absolutely signature move - mathematics as nothing less than the discourse of ontology as such. It is mathematics, that is, that speaks Being, that is the discourse most adequate to its expression and its study by the otherwise finite 'configurations' that we (only sometimes, according to Badiou) are. And this to the extent that it is mathematics that is most suited to the study of the continuous, given the austere explicitness of its operations.
Or to put it otherwise, what is distinct about mathematics is its ability to a-count (quite literally) for itself. All that happens in mathematics follows from the 'monotony' (Badiou's word) of its deductions, such that every step can be discerned, without ambiguity, from the last. What better than this investigation, operating 'without gaps', for the study of the continuous? But more importantly still - what better investigation to find, at its limit, what cannot be accounted for by this most rigorous formulation of continuity? And there lies the nub of Badiou's project: the effort to use math, as it were, against itself; to find, by mathematical means alone, the symptomatic points at which math itself gives way to what exceeds it, not from without, but from within. Hence, to take just one of these points: the study of infinity, so important here, which in the wake of Cantor, explodes outwards into an infinity of infinities, an index of the 'errancy of the quantitative', unmasterable on its terms.
To say all this - so much already - is to give nothing but the most minimal outline of the programme within, which is rich, far too rich, for any pithy summary as this to capture. While I've focused on the math - for me the most intriguing - it's also the case that at stake in all this is the realignment of the very possibilities of philosophy itself. For, by staking ontology on a discourse 'without concept' (i.e. math), the very privilege of the concept, for so long sovereign over philosophy, is here called into question - and with it, the past and future of what philosophy has been, and will be. If at least that past is addressed here too (in the guise of readings of Aristotle, Hegel, Leibniz, Pascal and others, alongside the math, and alongside the poets, who I've completely neglected), the philosophical future itself can only be radically other in the wake - don't make me say it, I have to say it - of the Event, of Being and Event.
August 19, 2024
I read Being and Event ages ago, and since then have gradually formed a more negative view of Badiou as I've read more philosophy, in part because of the militancy (and relative incoherence) of his attacks on my boy Deleuze.
Both Badiou and Deleuze deploy mathematics to articulate their ideas, but the approach taken by each is markedly different. My intuition is to prefer Deleuze's, which modestly rubs familiar concepts from mathematics together with his metaphysics to generate insight without any pretence of rigour, in keeping with Deleuze's claims for a primarily genetic and intuitive, rather than deductive or logical creation of concepts.
The rest of this review will focus on why Being and Event's approach to mathematics gradually started to smell bad to me as years passed and I understood more of it.
Badiou's famous "wager" is "mathematics is ontology". When I first read this phrase I thought it meant something like "what we can say about being, for example in nature, is fundamentally mathematical in character". Sadly, Badiou eagerly explains it doesn't mean that.
What "mathematics is ontology" is instead given to mean is that, to the extent that we can use language to designate, describe and express being as being, whatever mathematics we presently have is the language with which we do it.
It's a clever idea, with immediate soothing consequences. It offers a nice definition of what mathematics does, and clarifies the importance of questions about the being of mathematical objects. Badiou later rearticulates the claim with the subtler and clearer "mathematics is the historicity of the discourse of being qua being", which emphasises that as mathematics itself is developed, the discourse of being also advances. Both change.
This wager also brings forth the category of "that-which-is-but-is-not-being-qua-being" that Badiou will use to undergird his theory of the event.
(Badiou apparently later backed away from "mathematics is ontology", starting to refer to it as having been a necessary provocation that he'd made up to shake things up and piss off Heideggerians. So whatever I think about the already qualified premises of Being and Event, I hear they are further hedged and qualified in Badiou's later works.)
In fact, the qualifications already mentioned concerning the historic and linguistic character of mathematics are found in the introduction to Being and Event, which I have a strong hunch was written after the 37 meditations that make up the body of the book.
Badiou's purpose with "mathematics is ontology" is to subtract ontology from its usual central position within the broader work of philosophy. Mathematicians have ontology covered.
"Mathematics is ontology", therefore, is labelled as a "meta-ontological" claim that supports the circulation of a philosophy, perfectly distinct from the ontology that has been cut out of it, through ontology in order to reason about truth and the subject, and Badiou's "truth procedures" politics, science, art and love.
Badiou says that what he calls "the Cantor-event" (Georg Cantor devising originary set theory) inaugurated a new epoch (or historicity) of the mathematical expression of being, with the appearance of set theory and of the project to axiomatise all maths.
Two big catches come up here, which Badiou semi-successfully intercepts and diverts.
The first catch is the question "Why set theory?" If all mathematics has this ontological character, then set theory should have no special claim to support the circulation of ontology with philosophy. Badiou sends this concern back calmly, attributing to set theory a "symptomatic" character which particularly expresses an anxiety inherent to mathematics, that it be the discourse of being qua being. Badiou uses this urge to claim persistently coincident advances of mathematical and metaphysical thought.
For the 60s and 70s France in which Being and Event was written this perhaps wasn't unreasonable. Set theory had slowed its formation at the end of a long drama concerning the project to axiomatise maths, which had called forth jump scares like Russell's Paradox, Gödel's theorems, and Cohen's pessimistic work on the continuum hypothesis.
(Crucially though, Badiou admits here that if there were other equally "symptomatic" mathematics available, in principle it should be equally good material for his philosophical enquiry.)
The second catch is the "crisis" of disputes and confusion concerning the axioms of set theory. Among others, Russell's Paradox—given by the unrestricted comprehension of the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves"—had led to the obsolescence of various set theories, and their replacement by the Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZFC) set theory, which includes the so-called axiom schema of specification.
The axiom schema of specification is amusingly circular, as it pretty much says "whatever predicate you use to say whether stuff is in or out of a set is only allowed if the way it says stuff is in or out of a set leads to something that's just, like, a normal set". Badiou chooses to chastise this fresh restriction as chickenshit (saying it's not "philosophically decisive"), and states that the “knot of language, existence and the multiple” underpinning the drama of unrestricted comprehension that led to ZFC set theory must remain in view due to its significance.
As we'll see, what he means by this is that he's going to use unrestricted comprehension when he needs to produce paradox.
All of this mighty preamble leads up to the point where armed with ZFC set theory, Badiou declares himself able to leap off on a philosophical project that uses it to explicate the being of truth, the subject and more.
Badiou begins this project with a theorisation of being qua being as the irreducibly multiple, the not-one. Having read the introduction, what we expect to see is set-theoretical mathematics being cited to produce historically and linguistically conditioned insights about being. However, as the meditations continue, these qualifications are largely absent, so at all times the work is stating "over here we have the set theoretical expressions, and over here we have a comment about how they are expressed in being".
It was in Meditation 7 that some of this stuff really started to make my eyebrows raise. There, Badiou uses the well known proof that no set is equinumerous to its power set, to prove a contrast between belonging (being an element of) and inclusion (being a subset of) marks an "excess" of all things to themselves.
By Meditations 17 and 18, we are into the bushes, with Badiou developing a theory of the "matheme of the Event" or "that-which-is-not-being-qua-being" using constructions that would be considered irregular in classic ZFC set theory—though not in all set theories—such as sets that contain themselves.
By this stage, we're consuming a Badiou who's spitting questionably-well-formed mathematical expressions as he musters one of his most important ideas, who hasn't yet dreamt the qualifications of historicity and language appearing in his introduction, and who argues his corner with selective resort to his preferred inconsistencies in set theory, all the while maintaining the consistency of the logic with which he declares himself to be thinking paradox with rigour.
The vibes are not good.
In 2012, a scholar called Arkady Plotnitsky produced a little known paper called "Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck" in which he makes a few claims: he says that Badiou declines to explore the potential of "mathematics is ontology" in light of a number of "symptomatic" developments of mathematical knowledge, and he says that by so declining, Badiou covers up an unremovable nonmathematical residue that must organise ontology, falsifying the claim it's solely mathematical.
Plotnitsky's paper asks this question: if great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck produced topos theory, and the theory of elementary topoi can
1. incorporate all known set theories, however axiomatised as elements, including all the variations pertinent to the "crisis" that preceded ZFC set theory, and
2. set itself out as a potential ground of mathematics, as set theory does
then why does Badiou, who does choose to take up topos theory in Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II for other purposes, not observe these "symptomatic" traits, and "upgrade" the crucial set-theoretical entanglements of his philosophy in Being and Event with topos-theoretical entanglements?
The simple, and slightly shameful answer, is that there would be no way for Badiou to do that without shredding his œuvre. Not only does he not seem to stick to a single formulation of set theory within Being and Event—instead speaking of ZFC set theory while sometimes batting about improperly comprehended sets—Badiou's conceptualisation of the event relies on inconsistencies in theory, that although fascinating, also resonate due to the drama and impact of the development of twentieth century set theory, and of the pessimistic outcomes of the project to ground mathematical rationality. The rest is largely a magician's performance of rigour, its rectitude not salient.
In Being and Event Badiou puts himself forward as the bearer of a philosophy proper to the epoch inaugurated by "the Cantor-event", which in its circulation will use the new, historically formed, expressive powers of set theory to inscribe the being of matters such as truth and the subject into being itself.
But what seems actually to have happened is an embarrassing converse: some other chain of events has inaugurated Badiou's philosophy, which distinguishes itself by grounding strong claims concerning the being of matters such as truth and the subject in an intellectually fashionable contention over the legendary project to axiomatise all of mathematics—and therefore chooses the contemporary set theory already influentially (mis)used by thinkers such as Lacan as its rhetoric.
In the end, after stealing so much valour, Badiou's philosophy is forced to decline to transform its selection of set theory to a better one, even though to do so would align with how he himself articulates the impact of appropriately "symptomatic" mathematical precepts, as events, overturning each other in a historicity of the discourse of being qua being.
I don't suggest Badiou's project is insincere, or his philosophical conclusions are uninteresting, or that he's a bad thinker. Personally I don't warm to his project, but moments within it are hilarious and dazzling. And there's much to be said for Badiou's unwavering, and correct-when-it-was-unfashionable ethical and political commitments. However, with his great wager, Badiou put forward a radical claim that leaves his approach in Being and Event wonderfully brittle. As mathematicians, unwittingly, have advanced their knowledge, any ongoing project of Badiou's to repurpose mathematics' ontological implications for a properly current philosophy has already fractured, or might instead be imagined to exist unspoken and suspended, poised to erase all of Badiou's philosophical conclusions to date. Sad!
If only Badiou had said, as Deleuze would have, "I want to rub my expansive knowledge of set theory up against my urgent ideas concerning politics, love and science and see what pops out", he could still have feigned rigour, and just done a good job turning the descriptive strengths of set theory to the world and to history. The guy's still alive—who's going to let him know there's still time to walk things back even further?
Both Badiou and Deleuze deploy mathematics to articulate their ideas, but the approach taken by each is markedly different. My intuition is to prefer Deleuze's, which modestly rubs familiar concepts from mathematics together with his metaphysics to generate insight without any pretence of rigour, in keeping with Deleuze's claims for a primarily genetic and intuitive, rather than deductive or logical creation of concepts.
The rest of this review will focus on why Being and Event's approach to mathematics gradually started to smell bad to me as years passed and I understood more of it.
Badiou's famous "wager" is "mathematics is ontology". When I first read this phrase I thought it meant something like "what we can say about being, for example in nature, is fundamentally mathematical in character". Sadly, Badiou eagerly explains it doesn't mean that.
What "mathematics is ontology" is instead given to mean is that, to the extent that we can use language to designate, describe and express being as being, whatever mathematics we presently have is the language with which we do it.
It's a clever idea, with immediate soothing consequences. It offers a nice definition of what mathematics does, and clarifies the importance of questions about the being of mathematical objects. Badiou later rearticulates the claim with the subtler and clearer "mathematics is the historicity of the discourse of being qua being", which emphasises that as mathematics itself is developed, the discourse of being also advances. Both change.
This wager also brings forth the category of "that-which-is-but-is-not-being-qua-being" that Badiou will use to undergird his theory of the event.
(Badiou apparently later backed away from "mathematics is ontology", starting to refer to it as having been a necessary provocation that he'd made up to shake things up and piss off Heideggerians. So whatever I think about the already qualified premises of Being and Event, I hear they are further hedged and qualified in Badiou's later works.)
In fact, the qualifications already mentioned concerning the historic and linguistic character of mathematics are found in the introduction to Being and Event, which I have a strong hunch was written after the 37 meditations that make up the body of the book.
Badiou's purpose with "mathematics is ontology" is to subtract ontology from its usual central position within the broader work of philosophy. Mathematicians have ontology covered.
"Mathematics is ontology", therefore, is labelled as a "meta-ontological" claim that supports the circulation of a philosophy, perfectly distinct from the ontology that has been cut out of it, through ontology in order to reason about truth and the subject, and Badiou's "truth procedures" politics, science, art and love.
Badiou says that what he calls "the Cantor-event" (Georg Cantor devising originary set theory) inaugurated a new epoch (or historicity) of the mathematical expression of being, with the appearance of set theory and of the project to axiomatise all maths.
Two big catches come up here, which Badiou semi-successfully intercepts and diverts.
The first catch is the question "Why set theory?" If all mathematics has this ontological character, then set theory should have no special claim to support the circulation of ontology with philosophy. Badiou sends this concern back calmly, attributing to set theory a "symptomatic" character which particularly expresses an anxiety inherent to mathematics, that it be the discourse of being qua being. Badiou uses this urge to claim persistently coincident advances of mathematical and metaphysical thought.
For the 60s and 70s France in which Being and Event was written this perhaps wasn't unreasonable. Set theory had slowed its formation at the end of a long drama concerning the project to axiomatise maths, which had called forth jump scares like Russell's Paradox, Gödel's theorems, and Cohen's pessimistic work on the continuum hypothesis.
(Crucially though, Badiou admits here that if there were other equally "symptomatic" mathematics available, in principle it should be equally good material for his philosophical enquiry.)
The second catch is the "crisis" of disputes and confusion concerning the axioms of set theory. Among others, Russell's Paradox—given by the unrestricted comprehension of the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves"—had led to the obsolescence of various set theories, and their replacement by the Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZFC) set theory, which includes the so-called axiom schema of specification.
The axiom schema of specification is amusingly circular, as it pretty much says "whatever predicate you use to say whether stuff is in or out of a set is only allowed if the way it says stuff is in or out of a set leads to something that's just, like, a normal set". Badiou chooses to chastise this fresh restriction as chickenshit (saying it's not "philosophically decisive"), and states that the “knot of language, existence and the multiple” underpinning the drama of unrestricted comprehension that led to ZFC set theory must remain in view due to its significance.
As we'll see, what he means by this is that he's going to use unrestricted comprehension when he needs to produce paradox.
All of this mighty preamble leads up to the point where armed with ZFC set theory, Badiou declares himself able to leap off on a philosophical project that uses it to explicate the being of truth, the subject and more.
Badiou begins this project with a theorisation of being qua being as the irreducibly multiple, the not-one. Having read the introduction, what we expect to see is set-theoretical mathematics being cited to produce historically and linguistically conditioned insights about being. However, as the meditations continue, these qualifications are largely absent, so at all times the work is stating "over here we have the set theoretical expressions, and over here we have a comment about how they are expressed in being".
It was in Meditation 7 that some of this stuff really started to make my eyebrows raise. There, Badiou uses the well known proof that no set is equinumerous to its power set, to prove a contrast between belonging (being an element of) and inclusion (being a subset of) marks an "excess" of all things to themselves.
By Meditations 17 and 18, we are into the bushes, with Badiou developing a theory of the "matheme of the Event" or "that-which-is-not-being-qua-being" using constructions that would be considered irregular in classic ZFC set theory—though not in all set theories—such as sets that contain themselves.
By this stage, we're consuming a Badiou who's spitting questionably-well-formed mathematical expressions as he musters one of his most important ideas, who hasn't yet dreamt the qualifications of historicity and language appearing in his introduction, and who argues his corner with selective resort to his preferred inconsistencies in set theory, all the while maintaining the consistency of the logic with which he declares himself to be thinking paradox with rigour.
The vibes are not good.
In 2012, a scholar called Arkady Plotnitsky produced a little known paper called "Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck" in which he makes a few claims: he says that Badiou declines to explore the potential of "mathematics is ontology" in light of a number of "symptomatic" developments of mathematical knowledge, and he says that by so declining, Badiou covers up an unremovable nonmathematical residue that must organise ontology, falsifying the claim it's solely mathematical.
Plotnitsky's paper asks this question: if great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck produced topos theory, and the theory of elementary topoi can
1. incorporate all known set theories, however axiomatised as elements, including all the variations pertinent to the "crisis" that preceded ZFC set theory, and
2. set itself out as a potential ground of mathematics, as set theory does
then why does Badiou, who does choose to take up topos theory in Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II for other purposes, not observe these "symptomatic" traits, and "upgrade" the crucial set-theoretical entanglements of his philosophy in Being and Event with topos-theoretical entanglements?
The simple, and slightly shameful answer, is that there would be no way for Badiou to do that without shredding his œuvre. Not only does he not seem to stick to a single formulation of set theory within Being and Event—instead speaking of ZFC set theory while sometimes batting about improperly comprehended sets—Badiou's conceptualisation of the event relies on inconsistencies in theory, that although fascinating, also resonate due to the drama and impact of the development of twentieth century set theory, and of the pessimistic outcomes of the project to ground mathematical rationality. The rest is largely a magician's performance of rigour, its rectitude not salient.
In Being and Event Badiou puts himself forward as the bearer of a philosophy proper to the epoch inaugurated by "the Cantor-event", which in its circulation will use the new, historically formed, expressive powers of set theory to inscribe the being of matters such as truth and the subject into being itself.
But what seems actually to have happened is an embarrassing converse: some other chain of events has inaugurated Badiou's philosophy, which distinguishes itself by grounding strong claims concerning the being of matters such as truth and the subject in an intellectually fashionable contention over the legendary project to axiomatise all of mathematics—and therefore chooses the contemporary set theory already influentially (mis)used by thinkers such as Lacan as its rhetoric.
In the end, after stealing so much valour, Badiou's philosophy is forced to decline to transform its selection of set theory to a better one, even though to do so would align with how he himself articulates the impact of appropriately "symptomatic" mathematical precepts, as events, overturning each other in a historicity of the discourse of being qua being.
I don't suggest Badiou's project is insincere, or his philosophical conclusions are uninteresting, or that he's a bad thinker. Personally I don't warm to his project, but moments within it are hilarious and dazzling. And there's much to be said for Badiou's unwavering, and correct-when-it-was-unfashionable ethical and political commitments. However, with his great wager, Badiou put forward a radical claim that leaves his approach in Being and Event wonderfully brittle. As mathematicians, unwittingly, have advanced their knowledge, any ongoing project of Badiou's to repurpose mathematics' ontological implications for a properly current philosophy has already fractured, or might instead be imagined to exist unspoken and suspended, poised to erase all of Badiou's philosophical conclusions to date. Sad!
If only Badiou had said, as Deleuze would have, "I want to rub my expansive knowledge of set theory up against my urgent ideas concerning politics, love and science and see what pops out", he could still have feigned rigour, and just done a good job turning the descriptive strengths of set theory to the world and to history. The guy's still alive—who's going to let him know there's still time to walk things back even further?
September 17, 2015
Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It's often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don't really "explain" in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is "illegal" because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.
In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself -- in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is "made for us" by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn't at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said
I don't find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:
And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou's own allegiance to a very tradition topography!
I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou's terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it's difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it's nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.
I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn't simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier--but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition... that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.
Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won't go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it's not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He's started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he's hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there's no reason not to.
In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.
In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself -- in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is "made for us" by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn't at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said
I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).
I don't find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:
A philosophy worthy of the name--the name which began with Paramenides--is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).
And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou's own allegiance to a very tradition topography!
I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou's terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it's difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it's nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.
I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn't simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier--but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition... that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.
Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won't go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it's not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He's started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he's hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there's no reason not to.
In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.
November 10, 2023
First 300pages were amazing, after that I just got lost. Great book, will reread in the future
January 9, 2020
I am going to give this 3 stars. This is due to an average. The first half of the book is worth 5 starts for its well written synopsis of philosophy. The second half of the book is worth 1 star for its attempt to apply set theory to social relationships and the humanities. No one in their right mind would think that the inconsistent complicated states of human nature could be explained by math, and it is quite a stunning achievement in self deception to have written the second half of this book.
July 20, 2012
A monumental book that restores the dignity and elegance of mathematics to continental philosophy. Although this is a challenging read, the rewards of this book outweigh the difficulties encountered when attempting to achieve the former. As far as philosophy is concerned, this book presents a fresh approach to ontology, one which goes far beyond the heideggerian edifice. Based largely on the achievements of set theory, this book argues for an open ontology, one wherein truth can rupture seemingly static conceptual and social situations, bringing about changes of universal significance. A bold book that is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and materialist ontologies.
October 10, 2015
It is an interesting and honest attempt at reconciling materialism with faith while avoiding the trappings of traditional teleological talks, but I have mixed feelings about some of Badiou's interpretation of mathematics.
October 9, 2023
I'd been intending to share my thoughts on "Being and event" after reading "Logics of worlds", but having dropped the latter due to its (in my view, and in relation to the former) needlessly exaggerated verbosity, I'm doing this now.
"Being and event" will now be a part of my go-to books on theory; so-called "non-One" theory, or the ontology of multiplicities. If I were to devise a reading list as of today, I'd say one would start with Kojeve's "Intro to Hegel", work their way through "Ecrits", then immediately pick up "Being and event" to grasp the actuality of Lacan's ontology. Only after having read "Being and event" should one attempt to tackle Zizek's "Less than nothing" in my view.
Badiou presents a system of a knowable Being-as-such, presented through the language of mathematics, more specifically set theory, so it's a further clarification on Hegelian ontology as presented through mathematical structures. Lacanian or even Derridean maxims such as "There is no big Other" or "There is nothing outside the text" (misattributed as the latter quote is) become strikingly clear when viewed through the lense of pure mathematics.
I'm giving the book 4/5 stars merely because its latter sections become increasingly unclear - most probably due to Badiou's neologisms not being immediately clear. Further, because the political notion of radicalism presented in the further parts of the book don't seem to me as well substantiated in comparison to the purely ontological claims. The notion of "truth" is somewhat vague to grasp, where it isn't immediately clear whether Badiou is making ethical statements about a Truth-Lie polarity, or if it's a general (generic?) term towards event-products a subject can choose to be faithful towards. In other words, does Badiou state universal, generic truths are objectively produced by an event, or are they subjective cornerstones, so to say, towards which a group of people can express fidelity.
With all that said, "Being and event" is a must-read for anyone interested in the French school of (post-)modern philosophical thought and is at least a few storeys above mainstream positivist frameworks. I can recommend it to anyone who's had deeper-than-usual interest in Lacanian work, or anyone at least remotely familiar with Hegelian/Schopenhauerian thought.
"Being and event" will now be a part of my go-to books on theory; so-called "non-One" theory, or the ontology of multiplicities. If I were to devise a reading list as of today, I'd say one would start with Kojeve's "Intro to Hegel", work their way through "Ecrits", then immediately pick up "Being and event" to grasp the actuality of Lacan's ontology. Only after having read "Being and event" should one attempt to tackle Zizek's "Less than nothing" in my view.
Badiou presents a system of a knowable Being-as-such, presented through the language of mathematics, more specifically set theory, so it's a further clarification on Hegelian ontology as presented through mathematical structures. Lacanian or even Derridean maxims such as "There is no big Other" or "There is nothing outside the text" (misattributed as the latter quote is) become strikingly clear when viewed through the lense of pure mathematics.
I'm giving the book 4/5 stars merely because its latter sections become increasingly unclear - most probably due to Badiou's neologisms not being immediately clear. Further, because the political notion of radicalism presented in the further parts of the book don't seem to me as well substantiated in comparison to the purely ontological claims. The notion of "truth" is somewhat vague to grasp, where it isn't immediately clear whether Badiou is making ethical statements about a Truth-Lie polarity, or if it's a general (generic?) term towards event-products a subject can choose to be faithful towards. In other words, does Badiou state universal, generic truths are objectively produced by an event, or are they subjective cornerstones, so to say, towards which a group of people can express fidelity.
With all that said, "Being and event" is a must-read for anyone interested in the French school of (post-)modern philosophical thought and is at least a few storeys above mainstream positivist frameworks. I can recommend it to anyone who's had deeper-than-usual interest in Lacanian work, or anyone at least remotely familiar with Hegelian/Schopenhauerian thought.
Read
January 9, 2023نا مرتبط با کتاب - کوتاه درباب آثار کلاسیک: واقعیت امر اینجاست که آثار کلاسیک به خصوص در رشته هایی که با تاریخشون پیوندی تنگاتنگ دارن اصلا تموم نمیشن صرفا به جایی میرسی که تصمیم میگیری برای مدتی بازخوانیشون نکنی چون وقت بابت پیچیدگی هاشون اجازه نمیده یا موضوع خاصی رو برات پروبلماتیزه کردن که کل متن اثر راجع به اون نیست و مجابت میکنن که برای مدتی صرفا به اون موضوع خاص بپردازی و البته وسوسه... وسوسه اصلی آثار کلاسیک از متفکران بزرگ بیش از ارائه خودشون، یک نوع فراخوان اغواگر برای خوندن سایر آثار کلاسیک هست که باعث میشه از بستر یک اثر خاص بیرون بجهی و برای مدتی پروندش رو ببندی، هر لحظه خواننده به این خواهد اندیشید که آیا همچین هیولاها و ققنوسهایی در در متون اصلی دیگر متفکران مهم هم نهفتس؟
بنظرم وضعیت عموم این آثار در قفسه کتاب ها بعد از اولین دوره مطالعشون بجای «خوانده شده» باید عنوانی مثل «همیشه در حال خوانده شدن اما فعلا متوقف» یا مثلا عنوان متناقض «گشودهٔ بسته» یا اگر به زبون بِکِتی بگیم بشه گفت «گامی نه به پیش» رو بگیرند بعد از زمانی که برای مدتی کوتاه یا تا لحظه مرگ دیگه متنشون رو باز روخوانی نخواهیم کرد!
بنظرم وضعیت عموم این آثار در قفسه کتاب ها بعد از اولین دوره مطالعشون بجای «خوانده شده» باید عنوانی مثل «همیشه در حال خوانده شدن اما فعلا متوقف» یا مثلا عنوان متناقض «گشودهٔ بسته» یا اگر به زبون بِکِتی بگیم بشه گفت «گامی نه به پیش» رو بگیرند بعد از زمانی که برای مدتی کوتاه یا تا لحظه مرگ دیگه متنشون رو باز روخوانی نخواهیم کرد!
July 15, 2023
Hay un motivo por el que, 35 años más tarde, este se sigue sintiendo como el último clásico de la filosofía continental. El programa de combinar y concluir el pensamiento abierto en el siglo XX mediante una combinación de los aportes de Lacan, Heidegger y la matemática contemporánea es desarrollado con bastante efectividad por Badiou. Y sorprende lo (relativamente) fácil que es seguir su argumentación, pese a que el libro está organizado a partir de fórmulas lógico-matemáticas. Las explicaciones son claras, las tesis convincentes. Vale la pena.
July 8, 2025
that math made my head hurt.
Read
September 26, 2023none of it is in the bible
August 23, 2014
Difficult book that is made more difficult by the fact that Badiou does not explain in the beginning what the problem is that he addresses. He makes references to Descartes, Lacan and his earlier work Theory of the Subject but one has to wait until the last meditation for him to put his cards on the table. The book is about Lacan's complicated twists on Descartes' cogito: where I think I am not etc, which point to the crux of Lacan's thought: the subject. He uses Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory to do this. The answer Badiou provides is a bit of a letdown, which he himself admits: he calls his solution to the problem, namely the "indiscernible", which he attributes to P.J. Cohen, artificial and apparent. The point is that he sets out to situation the subject in the matheme of the indiscernible, which turns to the "undecidable" in the process. He changes hats towards the end: about four-quarters of the book he has spoken as an ontologist, in which capacity he is able to prove his point that the subject can be situation in the discernible, and towards the end he starts talking as an inhabitant of the so-called quasi-complete situation and he proves the existence of the indiscernible by changing the viewpoint from ontologist to that inhabitant, for which purpose he enlists the services of names, in particular "canonical", i.e. non-supernumerary names, which evoke the indiscernible as the referent of the name. Yes, it is a bit complicated. It becomes a lot clear if you read the book, LOL!
January 6, 2021
I skimmed the final hundred pages, otherwise I learned a lot. Few references to Sartre, and it appears to take Heidegger for granted; also a background in Fraud, Marx and Mallarme would be helpful to you, if you were to read it, but I think the logic parts would be child's play for someone with your background.
December 17, 2012
Badiou makes some good points but his Maoist background leads him back into a subjectivist situation he himself has discredited.
August 10, 2019
This is the fourth book written by Badiou I read, and of course the first serious book! ( previously I've read "In Praise of Love", "Republic" and "The Century" . Also, I've read Zizek's discussion of Badiou in Zizek's "Ticklish Subject" and "In Defense of Lost Cause"). And I've a mixed feeling for spending so much time to go through this complex and dense book.
Cons:
On the negative side, my fundamental understanding of Badiou isn't really changed, so at the end of the day it might not have worth the effort. You don't really have to understand Badiou's interpretation of set theory to know what the two basic concepts "Being" and "Event" mean in the Badiouen sense. Spending a few days to read Zizek's chapter on Badiou would get you a similar result to spending weeks to go through this book.
Also, the mathematics aren't easy for readers without a science background (despite Badiou's claim that no a priori knowledge of mathematics is needed). I admit I've even given up on going through the incredibly technical Appendix of Meditation 36. I just go straight to the result of the mathematics demonstration.
But by no means the non-mathematics chapters would make your life easier too! Instead, they even add up to the overall difficulty of the book because Badiou's discussion of those thinkers is so condensed (less than 10 pages for each of those meditation), which means he presupposed that you have a pretty good grasp of those thinkers already and that he can go straight to the discussion of the relevance of those thinkers to the ideas he put forward in this book. So your reading process will be interrupted all the time because of the need to read stuff related to those thinkers before coming back the book.
Pros:
Notwithstanding these issues, my understanding of Badiou have definitely improved because his exposition here is very elaborate. Reading other books of Badiou becomes a lot easier afterwards.
Besides, his readings of Mallerme and Rousseau are a thing of beauty. This alone makes it worth the effort to go through all the previous meditations so that you would reach the meditations on them. Mallerme's impenetrable poems and Rousseau's mysterious "General Will" suddenly become crystal-clear through Badiou's readings. ( Although it still takes efforts to understand Badiou's reading of them)
It also seems to me to be the only way to understand how science is one of the four truth-generic procedure for Badiou is by reading this book. Science is usually very positivist/empirical and it is difficult to understand why Badiou sees it as a truth-procedure. Badiou's detailed study of set theory will give you an answer to this question.
Cons:
On the negative side, my fundamental understanding of Badiou isn't really changed, so at the end of the day it might not have worth the effort. You don't really have to understand Badiou's interpretation of set theory to know what the two basic concepts "Being" and "Event" mean in the Badiouen sense. Spending a few days to read Zizek's chapter on Badiou would get you a similar result to spending weeks to go through this book.
Also, the mathematics aren't easy for readers without a science background (despite Badiou's claim that no a priori knowledge of mathematics is needed). I admit I've even given up on going through the incredibly technical Appendix of Meditation 36. I just go straight to the result of the mathematics demonstration.
But by no means the non-mathematics chapters would make your life easier too! Instead, they even add up to the overall difficulty of the book because Badiou's discussion of those thinkers is so condensed (less than 10 pages for each of those meditation), which means he presupposed that you have a pretty good grasp of those thinkers already and that he can go straight to the discussion of the relevance of those thinkers to the ideas he put forward in this book. So your reading process will be interrupted all the time because of the need to read stuff related to those thinkers before coming back the book.
Pros:
Notwithstanding these issues, my understanding of Badiou have definitely improved because his exposition here is very elaborate. Reading other books of Badiou becomes a lot easier afterwards.
Besides, his readings of Mallerme and Rousseau are a thing of beauty. This alone makes it worth the effort to go through all the previous meditations so that you would reach the meditations on them. Mallerme's impenetrable poems and Rousseau's mysterious "General Will" suddenly become crystal-clear through Badiou's readings. ( Although it still takes efforts to understand Badiou's reading of them)
It also seems to me to be the only way to understand how science is one of the four truth-generic procedure for Badiou is by reading this book. Science is usually very positivist/empirical and it is difficult to understand why Badiou sees it as a truth-procedure. Badiou's detailed study of set theory will give you an answer to this question.
March 16, 2025
Some books explain philosophy. Some books redefine it. But Being and Event is a rupture in the very fabric of intellectual history—a work that does not interpret reality but encodes it in pure mathematical abstraction.
Badiou begins with an assertion so radical that it erases centuries of metaphysics in an instant:
Being is multiplicity.
This is not a metaphor. This is a formal, set-theoretical fact. Reality does not emerge from some divine principle, from an immutable essence, or from human perception. It is pure, unstructured multiplicity—and the only way to grasp it is through mathematics.
For Badiou, ontology is not philosophy. Ontology is set theory. This book is not a work of humanist thought—it is an exploration into the logical scaffolding of existence itself.
• What is reality? Not a thing, but an infinite multiplicity formalized through Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.
• What is truth? Not correspondence, not coherence—an event that ruptures the current structure of knowledge and forces an absolute reconfiguration.
• What is subjectivity? Not consciousness, not identity—a fidelity to an event, an allegiance to a break in being itself.
Badiou does not ask questions—he obliterates them and replaces them with mathematical proofs. The One does not exist. The void is the foundation of being. Truths are not discovered but forced into existence through the militant act of thought.
Reading Being and Event is not an intellectual exercise—it is an ontological detonation. It is an encounter with the absolute, where thought is forced into its highest possible form, where language itself struggles against the weight of the real.
By the final pages, you are no longer the same reader. You have witnessed the structure of being itself, and there is no going back.
This is not a book. It is a mathematical event.
Badiou begins with an assertion so radical that it erases centuries of metaphysics in an instant:
Being is multiplicity.
This is not a metaphor. This is a formal, set-theoretical fact. Reality does not emerge from some divine principle, from an immutable essence, or from human perception. It is pure, unstructured multiplicity—and the only way to grasp it is through mathematics.
For Badiou, ontology is not philosophy. Ontology is set theory. This book is not a work of humanist thought—it is an exploration into the logical scaffolding of existence itself.
• What is reality? Not a thing, but an infinite multiplicity formalized through Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.
• What is truth? Not correspondence, not coherence—an event that ruptures the current structure of knowledge and forces an absolute reconfiguration.
• What is subjectivity? Not consciousness, not identity—a fidelity to an event, an allegiance to a break in being itself.
Badiou does not ask questions—he obliterates them and replaces them with mathematical proofs. The One does not exist. The void is the foundation of being. Truths are not discovered but forced into existence through the militant act of thought.
Reading Being and Event is not an intellectual exercise—it is an ontological detonation. It is an encounter with the absolute, where thought is forced into its highest possible form, where language itself struggles against the weight of the real.
By the final pages, you are no longer the same reader. You have witnessed the structure of being itself, and there is no going back.
This is not a book. It is a mathematical event.
February 12, 2024
No other book has helped me change the way I think permanently like this trilogy of philosophical masterclasses, of which this is the first.
Badiou takes modern mathematics seriously such that it informs his philosophy in a way that is true to the form of the original idea. Having a mathematics background, this is extremely refreshing.
Frequently mathematics is instrumentalized for the use by philosophy, here it is respected within its own context. This book & series usher in a new era of dialogue between these two subjects that hasn’t bared much fruit since the time of Descartes probably.
The subject of this one is something like “what is the nature of change,” as in:
Given a social world (a place in which Truth can function as a social process somewhere in the Venn diagram of Politics/Art/Science) how can a change (a disturbance or shift in the system such that it becomes radically different) actually or possibly occur.
Big warning: lots of math and dense philosophy to follow it took me like 3ish years to finish this properly.
Badiou takes modern mathematics seriously such that it informs his philosophy in a way that is true to the form of the original idea. Having a mathematics background, this is extremely refreshing.
Frequently mathematics is instrumentalized for the use by philosophy, here it is respected within its own context. This book & series usher in a new era of dialogue between these two subjects that hasn’t bared much fruit since the time of Descartes probably.
The subject of this one is something like “what is the nature of change,” as in:
Given a social world (a place in which Truth can function as a social process somewhere in the Venn diagram of Politics/Art/Science) how can a change (a disturbance or shift in the system such that it becomes radically different) actually or possibly occur.
Big warning: lots of math and dense philosophy to follow it took me like 3ish years to finish this properly.
November 26, 2018
Those with a background in the foundation of mathematics should consider glancing at the "ontological" chapters before reading the philosophical ones, which usually precedes the ontological. This is because Badiou often explores a philosophical idea (say, the void, Meditation 4) before introducing its ontological (i.e., mathematical) counterpart (here, the empty set, Meditation 5). The final discussion of forcing can be difficult because Badiou sometimes deviates his mathemes from those found in mathematical literature. The book, despite its tremendous density and difficulty, is still rewarding for both the philosopher and the mathematician.
February 11, 2024
This is a commitment. Be prepared to go over things write a free times. It takes a lot to get your head around some of this. What's nice is that it is self referential, and the appendices and notes at the back a lend to flipping around back and forth to try and get a handle of it. Bone up on your logic for it as well. It's a rewarding read of you have the endurance for it. I'm going back over it again out of order following the self references from the second to the last chapter or as it's called in here meditation. Good luck
May 27, 2017
my orchestra is gigantic
December 19, 2017
Tedious!
September 13, 2021
A book about nothing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 14, 2023
one of those rare works of philosophy that are genuinely life changing for those willing to stick through to the end
May 17, 2024
Took me years to understand that I didn't really understand. Beautiful
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews