Alain Badiou

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Reply Sat 17 Apr, 2010 11:34 am
I haven't read him yet, but on doing some surface research I am already fascinated. Has anyone read him? What do you think?
Quote:
In Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou coins the phrase "inaesthetic" to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation". Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of "nature", Badiou claims that art is "immanent" and "singular". It is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone. His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them".

I like that.
Quote:

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is the problem that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not.

I like the idea of being as negative one. "Nonism" - a self-negating/evolving monism. I think I'm going to have to go buy this book now.
Quote:

Badiou, following Lacan, uses "the real" to designate the space of existing but unsymbolizable reality that can only be thought retroactively through the truth procedures.

We have a symbol for the unsymbolizable.
 
jgweed
 
Reply Sun 18 Apr, 2010 07:30 am
@Reconstructo,
It is always much easier to discuss non-being than being-itself, and he is not the first to remark about the mysterious character of the term, being.

And don't we have the very same problems when we discuss "non-being"---in fact don't we have even more?
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Sun 18 Apr, 2010 04:11 pm
@jgweed,
jgweed;153558 wrote:
It is always much easier to discuss non-being than being-itself, and he is not the first to remark about the mysterious character of the term, being.

And don't we have the very same problems when we discuss "non-being"---in fact don't we have even more?


Ah yes, I went to the bookstore, paged thru his book. No doubt, he's a sharp guy, but I had enough reservations to not put out the cash. Instead did some research online. (The communism gives me pause, as my own obsession with mathematics/ontology has obscured my interest in politics.. So it goes..)

Yes, the discussion of non-being is perhaps even more difficult. I think we can infer some source of conceptualization that is itself beyond/behind concept, but this inference is nakedly conceptual. And this is what I mean by nonism. To say that being is negative one is just a sort of negative ontology that tries to dodge mistaking any contingent concept for THE concept. The unification faculty at the root of logos and mathema. Inferred from self-consciousness, abstracted from abstractions.

The "infinite" (or the "transrational") is no more (or less) real than a round square. That's where I'm coming from.

Here's a quote. I think I forgot to save the link. Sorry.
Quote:

The question is not simply "how does one think non-being?" but also (and Parmenides also recognized this) "how does one name non-being?" The proper name, as Badiou points out in a passage immediately following the above, is not the transcendent God or the promise of the One or presence but the "un-presentation and the un-being of the one" (cf. Derrida's comments on the possibility of a negative theology).
This non-presented (presentable only as the negation of presentable?) source of presentation is symbolized in my avatar by the minus sign. To call it a "one" is to stress its inferred function as unification itself. It's as if the mind can only think in ones. Heidegger didn't ask, did he, what are the Beings of beings? It seems we can't help reducing, simplifying, moving towards unity. Essence and unity. How close they seem! I'm interested in the proto-logic that founds both discourse and mathematics. Seems like Cusanus (sic?) was here long before. The union of opposites. A polygon with an n number of sides, as n tends toward infinity...and this is man's knowledge of god. Something of that. :Glasses:
 
jgweed
 
Reply Mon 19 Apr, 2010 07:02 am
@Reconstructo,
One of the more protracted and to my mind subtle discussions of non-being is found in Sartre, who writes that "The being of nothingness is the nothingness of being." The problem with many discussions of this topic is that it abandons rational discourse (for obvious reasons) and supplants that grounded discussion with mysticism.
 
Reconstructo
 
Reply Tue 20 Apr, 2010 09:09 pm
@jgweed,
jgweed;153950 wrote:
One of the more protracted and to my mind subtle discussions of non-being is found in Sartre, who writes that "The being of nothingness is the nothingness of being." The problem with many discussions of this topic is that it abandons rational discourse (for obvious reasons) and supplants that grounded discussion with mysticism.


That Sartre line has a certain charm, but it is ripe indeed for mystical assimilation.

Still, I don't think that all talk of being and nothingness is useless or indulgent. Kojeve's presentation of Hegel, for example, really brought the notion alive for me. Where in spatial being do we see concept, for instance? Where is the future in the present spatial being? And yet humans act according to desire and fear. I can only assume you know Heidegger much better than I do. Didn't he also talk of Being? And also of human time? Time for a creature that knows it must one day die?

For me a "nonbeing" would just be a nonspatial being. Doesn't Sartre examine this? Man is a nothingness because he can think what is not. He can think about the spatial present being other than it is, and therefore experience the spatial present as contingent...even if this contingency is a fiction.

But I will agree that its dark water.
 
 

 
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