Maths in the bedroom: Sex, the Signifier and the Smallest Whole Number

Badiou famously claims that there is no One. In this paper, I take us behind the scenes to the site where the One (if there were such a thing) would emerge. In fact, as I show, there are multiple Ones, which Lacan itemizes in his seminar on the Logic of the Fantasy (Seminar 14). There may be no One, but this is not to say there is no smallest whole number.

To Suture or Not to Suture: Poetry and Philosophy in the Thought of Alain Badiou

The un-suturing of philosophy from literature has been a cornerstone of Alain Badiou’s thought, resulting in not only a unique philosophy of art – inaesthetics – but also one of the very few instances of thinking about art which does not perform a ‘literary theory’ and instead compels a poetics. But is there a re-suturing of literature and poetics in the work of the poets Badiou most admires, the paragons of the so-called Age of Poets? This presentation argues that Badiou’s philosophy of art is one of the most significant and dynamic contemplations on literature in recent times. It also proposes an expansion of exemplars of an artistic truth-process beyond the poet-philosophers central to Badiou’s writing. The presentation includes a performance of a poem written specifically as both a tribute to Badiou’s thought and an intervention in the ‘ancient quarrel’ between poets and philosophers.

Badiou's Concept of History

In the interview ‘Beyond Formalization’, Badiou describes his enterprise as ‘one giant confrontation with the dialectic’. This remark buttresses a schema of interpretation that finds in Badiou’s early and late work a recasting of dialectical thought that contrasts with the regrettable abstraction of Being and Event and his writings in the 1990s. The worry is that a subject grounded in axiomatics rather than dialectics will be indifferent to the object and immune to the mediations that form the essential stuff of political practice as a historical phenomenon. The wager of this talk is that Badiou is in fact closest to history – which is to say: his vision of history is most incisive – when he is farthest from the dialectic. From the concern for phenomenal appearance in Logics of Worlds to the ‘reveil de l’histoire’ sketched in his most recent polemics, Badiou has progressively re-inscribed the subject in a variety of mediatory fields. This resurgence of dialectical maneuvers threatens to eclipse the signal innovation of Being and Event with regard to the subject and its relation to ‘historical situations’. Neither vector nor site nor totality, history in a truly objective view is inconsistent multiplicity, and the only consistency it manifests results from a subjective tenacity impervious to any alibi the dialectic might seek to supply. To use the language of his interlocutor Sylvain Lazarus, the difference between the ‘heterogeneous multiplicity, which denies singularity’ and the ‘homogenous multiplicity’ that sustains ‘historical modes of politics’ is a matter of thought, which is to say, a matter of subjects. Recusing the dialectic does not take Badiou’s philosophy away from history; it is what allows the former to finally discern the latter. The breadth and value of this vision beyond its descriptive purchase on militants in various fields of subjective engagement has yet to be adequately appreciated.

"Woman"'s Adventures With/in the Universal

In 2011 Badiou gave a conference in which, contrary to his core tenet of truths' trans-particularity, he was to rather startlingly proclaim that truth processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual difference. This paper investigates the tensions in Badiou's conceptual apparatus that might have led him to this inflexion of his thesis of the neutrality of the universal by charting the adventures of "woman" with and in the universal over the course of Badiou's work.

Deleuze’s Badiou

In a long footnote appended to a restatement of the main themes of Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Alain Badiou notes the peculiarity of the text that Deleuze devotes to his work in What is Philosophy? Indeed, Badiou goes so far as to write that “I would be grateful to anyone who could clarify this textual fragment for me, and explain what relation it bears to Being and Event. This is a genuine invitation, wholly devoid of irony.” The aim of this paper is to take up this invitation. I will argue that the text is indeed enigmatic, as Badiou asserts, and moreover that it dramatically falsifies the main theses of Being and Event. At the same time, it is possible to reconstruct a critical assertion from Deleuze’s remarks that poses a fundamental question to the project pursued in Being and Event and Badiou’s work more generally, around the theme of philosophy’s conditionality.

I will begin by locating the text (‘Example 12’, WP 151-2) in its immediate context, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of science as a mode of creative thinking, and in relation to the attack on logic that occupies the previous chapter. This reveals the key motivations of the discussion of Badiou. I will then consider the content of the example itself, and discuss the points at which it departs from Badiou’s own position in Being and Event. With these points in hand, then, I will attempt to reconstruct the critical force of the text, which turns around the claim that Badiou returns us to “an old conception of the higher philosophy,” (WP 152) that is, that Badiou’s reconception of the roles of art, science and philosophy necessarily fails, and does so for reasons relating to the role of logic in the construction of philosophy’s four conditions.

An Inessential Art? Positioning Cinema in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

This paper considers Alain Badiou’s understanding of cinema itself – taken in the generic sense, as an art almost entirely defined by its relation to other arts (as well as non-art) – while at the same time drawing out some of the more interesting artistic and philosophical consequences of his position. Following a brief examination of Badiou’s ‘inaesthetic’ conception of art and its relation to truth and philosophy, I go on to unpack Badiou’s implicit understanding of cinema as an ‘inessential’ art by isolating two central complications film presents to his inaesthetic program, specifically surrounding the crucial concepts of ‘singularity’ and ‘immanence’. I then move on to discuss cinema’s peculiar position among the arts, before finally addressing a number of paradoxes Badiou’s understanding of cinema gives rise to, as well as some of the challenges it presents his philosophical system as a whole.