Status Updates From Number and Numbers

Whatever can be said of Badiou, it is undoubtable that reading him is an *education*. To read Badiou is to embark on adventures with him, intellectual, yes, but no less wonder filled and even precarious!

that is to say not exposed to the disequilibrium between presentation and representation, a disequilibrium whose effective form is the eventual caesura; and submitted to a norm, that of a maximally-attenuated correspondence between the two major categories of ontological immanence: membership and inclusion.

This strong internal framework of the transitive set (the fact that everything that it presents in the multiple that it is, it represents a second time in the form of inclusion), this equilibrium, this maximal stability, leads me to say that transitive sets are "normal", taking "normal" in the double sense of non-pathological, stable,strongly equilibriated

Membership is an ontological function of presentation, indicating that which is presented in the count-for-one of a multiple. Inclusion is the ontological function of representation, indicating multiples re-counted as parts in the framework of a representation. It is a problem of great importance (the problem of the state of a situation) that is determined by the relation between presentation and representation.

the political, art, and love, are no longer equal to such axioms,and are therefore sidelined.They cling to Presence (art and love), refusing without fail the statement "zero is the proper numeric name of being" in order to give tribute to the obsolete rights of the One.Or(the political)they manage finitude, corroding day by day the statement "the situation is infinite", in order to valorise the authority of necessity

In the poem, the obscure is born of that which, as a breaking open of the signifier,at the limits of language, disseminates the letter. In the pure axiomatic of Peano, the retreat of sense proceeds from the fact that the force of the letter is turned upon itself, and that there is nothing outside, of which it could be the thought

Peano is as one with the idea that the universe of science reaches its apex in the forgetting of being, homogenous with the reabsorption of numericality into the unthought of technical will. Number is truly machinic. This is why it can be maintained that the success of Peano’s axiomatic participates in the great movement that has given up the matheme to modern sophistry, by unbinding it from all ontology

The question, then, is as follows: is there a concept of number capable of
subsuming, in a unique type of being, answering to a uniform procedure, at least the
whole natural numbers, the rational numbers, the real numbers and the ordinal
numbers, finite or infinite? And does it make sense to speak of a number without
knowing how to specify right away to which singular assemblage, irreducible to any
other, it belongs?

This book doesn't get into all the technical details of the surreal numbers, but it does present them in a way that I hadn't seen before, which I think is, in many ways, superior to the original presentation in terms of games.

Some of the "philosophizing" has been rather inscrutable to me so far, but there has also been some very interesting discussion of the history of the concept of "number". So far, I'm having fun and skimming past most of the inscrutable stuff.

Some of the "philosophizing" has been rather inscrutable to me so far, but there has also been some very interesting discussion of the history of the concept of "number". So far, I'm having fun and skimming past most of the inscrutable stuff.