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Notes
notes
1 In this respect, my reading is a dialectical one, especially in light of Bruno Bosteels’ call to move beyond the necessary and valuable task of exegesis in order to rethink specific situations in light of Badiou's work (“On the Subject of the Dialectic”).
2 The inseparable connection between event and truth leads Badiou to speak at times of the “Truth-Event.”
3 I am not so much interested here in detecting a repressed religious condition (à la Žižek), or indeed the odour of a theological corpse in his closet (for that is a game older than prostitution), but rather in exploring the way the category of the necessary fable emerges from within his thought.
4 Alain Badiou did in fact respond in this vein to a presentation of mine, which was an earlier version of this paper that made this point. It was at the “Singularity and Multiplicity” conference at Duke University, 26 March 2005, organized by the Institute for Critical Theory.
5 Especially the likes of Paul Ricouer, against whom Badiou warns us in relation to psychoanalysis and hermeneutics (Badiou, Theoretical Writings 129), Jean-Louis Chrétien, Louis Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion (see Janicaud).
6 For an excellent discussion of this sentence, see Peter Hallward (“Depending on Inconsistency” 17–18).
7
The crucial point, which Paul Cohen settled in the realm of ontology, i.e., of mathematics, is the following: you certainly cannot straightforwardly name the elements of a generic subset, since the latter is at once incomplete in its infinite composition and subtracted from every predicate which would directly identify it in the language. But you can maintain that if such and such an element will have been in the supposedly complete generic subset, then such and such a statement, rationally connectable to the element in question, is, or rather will have been, correct. Cohen describes this method – a method constraining the correctness of statements according to an anticipatory condition bearing on the composition of an infinite generic subset – as that of forcing. (Badiou, Theoretical Writings 127–28; see also Hallward, Badiou 135–39)
On Badiou's mathematics, see especially the appendix to Hallward's Badiou: A Subject to Truth.