2.

Badious decision

Every truly contemporary philosophy must set out from the singular theses according to which Althusser identifies philosophy. i

Alain Badiou, Metapolitics [1998]

In the 1970s Alain Badiou issued furious Maoist polemics against his former teacher. Decades later he came to concede the lasting significance of Althussers philosophical project for his own or at least the corrective theses of Lenin and Philosophy.2 In part this softening of stance could be put down to an inevitable mellowing which comes with age and achievement: the angry and scarcely read Maoist militant of the 1970s and early 1980s transformed into a world renowned philosopher, overshadowing his mentor and becoming possibly the continental traditions most respected living thinker. But the world had also changed in the interim. Where in the 1970s targeting the limitations of Althussers quietist programme could be seen as effecting a maximal scission in theoretical practice or, more importantly, as a political interruption the postcommunist world of the 1990s and beyond would render such antagonism anachronistic. The predominance of discourses of human rights, global governance, and perhaps more than anything else the elevation of the master signifier of democracy to a position of unimpeachable ethical-moralistic authority with, conversely, the assignment of communism, militancy, revolution and the will to truth to describe all that went awry in the 20th century has inestimably reconfigured the terrain. Addressing the prerogatives of Althusserian theory in a 2007 interview, Badiou concedes the role of changing historical conditions in its appraisal.

Evidently the question of theoreticism does not have the same importance today, but I would say that the relation between philosophy and politics today, or the question (of the role) of theory has once again become very important because the concrete situation has become very difficult and mixed. In those years [69-] we had great hope, truly massive, in the situation.3

Perhaps today more than ever, then, we can recognise in Badious violent break from Althusser an underlying proximity to his teacher. I preface with these remarks because there is another reason why Badious philosophy is infrequently considered in even qualified continuity with Althussers. The translation of Badious books into English proceeding from his Manifesto for Philosophy, the 1997 critique of Deleuze, The Clamour of Being4, and his 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event, and only recently working backwards to encompass the works of the 60s, 70s, and early 1980s, has certainly prejudiced interpretations in terms of an orientation towards comparisons with more metaphysical rivals like Deleuze and Heidegger. Although the rectification of this situation is underway thanks to the efforts of Bruno Bosteels and others in translating Badious earlier works such as Theory of the Subject, and in bringing to attention the renegotiation of Althusserianism across Badious philosophical trajectory, it remains an underappreciated angle. To what extent Althussers vanishing cause of structural causality persists in Badious idea of the event, and how formative can be considered Althussers tendency to privilege mathematics as the prototypical scientific practice in influencing Badious turn towards mathematical ontology, is often clouded by the sharp distinction wherein Althusser maintains history as being a process without a subject against Badious position which could be put oppositely: there is history only insofar as there are events and subjects. In isolating just this inversion, however, it is possible to lose sight of their overall conceptual

affinity, and moreover the political determinations contextualising their separation. The matter at hand therefore demands a reconstruction of the implosion of the Althusserian movement after 1968, up to which time Althussers prodigious students Jacques Rancire and Alain Badiou remained constructive partners in the structuralist endeavour. By tracing the genesis of Badious ideas to their Althusserian origin it is then possible to follow how ideas found in Badious early works re-emerge in the mid to late 1980s after a thoroughgoing purification from Althusserian doctrines. But precisely in regard to uncertainty over the persistent question of intellectual authority in Badious philosophy (whether construed as scientific or ontological) will this purification be put into question. Although the large and ever-growing secondary literature on Badious philosophy has traced his theoretical debts to Althusser, curiously little attention has been given to the Badious rearticulation of the role for intellectual guidance of the masses. Not unsurprisingly readings have fixated on the implication of politics occurring through sequences of unexpected events as opposed to a piecemeal or teleological emergence across drawn out timescales. Is political change a creeping process achieved through the steady building up of resources, or does it occur through spontaneous flashes that no amount of organization could hope to anticipate or engineer? Such is the binary to which Adrian Johnston has devoted a book-length study of Badious conception of political transformation. Johnston examines in detail debates surrounding Badious conception of the event: noting a dichotomy between those, like Peter Hallward, who see Badious conception as lending itself to flash politics and those, like Bosteels, who place emphasis on the laborious, disciplined work of affirmation after the event.5 Yet whichever way one looks at it neither perspective interrogates the question of intellectual authority in Badious theory of the event in much depth. This, I suspect, is because of the presumption that the events aleatory being automatically undermines the role for mass guidance. Leninist readings of Badious

philosophy such as Daniel Bensaids have understandably taken objection to the apparent anti-organizational conclusions that follow from viewing the event as a political miracle bestowed upon militants.6 Badious post-Maoist formation of the LOrganisation Politique in the 1980s with its aim to practice politics without a party organization of course only serves to reinforce to that impression. But the source of contention only obliquely broached by this emphasis on the temporality of politics is the part played by the intellectual. Or to put it as plainly as possible: just because the militant sequence occurs after an event does this ipso facto imply a diminution of the role for conceptually astute philosophers? If events are necessary for subject and if to some extent the notion of the subject in Badious mature philosophy is transitive with that of the event, who then is the subject? Who gets to decide an event really is an event? Whose enunciation of what counts as an event is privileged? Given Badious repeated insistence that the purpose of Being and Event is to establish a new conception of the subject, and bearing in mind the highly complex formal discourse of subjectivity he establishes in the first and second of his grand philosophy books, why not take Badiou on his word and think the implications of his idea of the event through the question of the subject? If the hallmark of Althussers conception of history as a process without a subject could be more accurately appended with except the masses and their representative institution, the PCF what determinate predicate is suitable for Badious conception of the subject? To approach Badious philosophy from the right angle to address the above questions, I will demonstrate the theoretical purpose played by the event in establishing a pre-reflective, egalitarian political condition wherein vanguardist pretensions like those of the PCF are immediately disqualified from any role in deciding the right time, the right subjects, or the right issues for revolt or revolution. By the same token, we will then see how the supernumerary, unpredictable event is beholden to the subjects affirmation to seal its

existence. The events duality as a both an undecideable happening and a result of a discourse of fidelity nonetheless maintains an awkward relationship between the intellectual and mass politics. For Badiou claims the subject of an event is not required to be one who actually took part in it: that is, the subject can be perfectly exterior to the facts on the ground as the French Maoists were to the actual Chinese Cultural Revolution, and as Badiou and many of the Maoists were to initial events of Paris 68. More problematically still, in the mathematical artifice of Being and Event the delimitation of the philosophers metaontological discourse to think the presentation of presentation, whilst being circumscribed by an inability to produce any truths itself, is an ideal to which the philosophical system will aspire but ultimately fail to maintain. The line between the metaontologists impotent if omnipotent view from outside and the subjects active if restricted view from the inside will hit the rocks by the crowning meditations on Paul Cohens theory of forcing. Because from within the mathematical demonstration pursued in a ground model of set theory the excess necessary for the objective event is repressed by the constructive, transitive nature of the model. Thus, there is no irreducible fact of event to be affirmed by an inhabitant inside this model. There is no impetus for an inhabitant subject of a situation to force new truths out of a situation. The egalitarian event is lost. Either a uniquely visionary subject within a situation can just see the possibility for forcing a new truth, or the impetus for the initiation of the truth procedure needs to come from outside: from the philosophical Subject who can prompt those with only their limited vision within any non-ontological situation. To clarify, none of the above is said to smite Badiou; in your present authors opinion some kind of intellectual guidance is unavoidable in all forms of politics. The argument rather serves as a genealogical angle to make sense of Badious political break from Althusser and how he attempted to theoretically resolve this without lapsing into exaltations of spontaneism and valorisations of democratic revolt. Addressing all of the above points will

involve, firstly, a discussion of Badious early work under the aegis of Althusserianism. Secondly, how the events of 1968 led to the implosion of this project; and particularly the singularity of Badious break from Althusser in comparison to Rancieres and also the political persuasion of the momentarily fashionable Maoist group, Gauche Proltarienne. Thirdly, how Badious idea of the event departs from the vanishing cause of Althussers epistemic break by posing the imperative of the subject to actualise its consequences. Fourth, and finally, how Being and Event strives towards resolving the issue of the authority of philosophers, but ultimately runs aground within the mathematical universe deployed in Paul Cohens forcing technique. We begin with those consensual years directly preceding 68, where Badiou seemed poised to take the mantle of arch Althusserian with his sophisticated text, The Concept of Model. For many of the same concerns will continue to surface in the metaontological edifice of Being and Event.

2.1 Early Work Like other influential offspring of Althussers student cadre (such as Nicos Poulantzas) in 1966 Badiou wrote an extensive review of the high watermark texts of the period For Marx and Reading Capital appraising them positively. The review essay, titled

(Re)commencement of dialectical materialism, isolates the question of change within structural causality as the lynchin upon which the ulterior progress of dialectical materialism depends.7 Remembering that for Althusser an epistemological break manifests itself effectively in the complex, social whole through the rupture between science and ideology, tracing a route from ideology to scientific disruption was considered dialectical materialisms highest calling.8 Alongside a number of other privileged Althusserians Badiou was also invited to take part in the 1967/68 Philosophy Course for Scientists. His distinctive

contribution was to find the resources for distinguishing science and ideology with respect to breakthroughs in 20th century mathematical model theory. In this early work, Badious trademark identification with set theory is evident and there are also hints towards category theory9 that will only re-emerge within the elaborate the post-Being and Event system almost 40 years later in Logics of Worlds. This approach structures what could be considered the arch-Althusserian text of the period, unrivalled in pushing Althusserian formalism to its limits. In more ways than one Badious contribution to the Philosophy Course lecture series his first fully-fledged theoretical text, The Concept of Model rests in almost total agreement with the Bachelardian-Althusserian protocols. For not only does it pursue the problematic through mathematics in a way shot through by the spirit of French scientific rationalism (see 1.1), it also operates along the double semantic register of model incidentally, already flagged up by Althusser in a footnote in Reading Capital10 a word signifying both a descriptive (ideological) notion of scientific activity, and a concept (scientific) of mathematical logic.11 Badious thesis rests on the wager that through the use of mathematical logic philosophy can perform the partisan role for the recovery of science that in the same lecture course Althusser insisted was philosophys duty; and it does this by turning the mathematical, logical model against the ideological, empiricist conception. Politically, this can be considered a contribution to class struggle in theory because of the ideological influence of bourgeois technical, economic models in fostering a revisionist Marxist deviation.12 Following Bachelard, however, Badiou does not wish to simply write off modelling as a form of representation alien to science. Bachelards example of Bohrs model of the atom portrayed as planetary orbits giving way to a more abstract statistical model demonstrates the conservation of forms of models passing through the rupture from ideology to science.13 So the easy option rejecting models entirely is off the table. The recovery of

science rather entails operating within modellings ideological terrain of representation, drawing a line of demarcation within philosophy between the formal model (progressive) and the vulgar epistemological model (reactionary). Singling out Levi-Strauss conception for particular criticism, Badiou condemns epistemological models for introducing a regulatory myth into epistemology. Presenting epistemological models as a technical artifice that corresponds with an empirical given by measure of their predictive success in experimentation permits the creation of models of models, systems of systems, all conspiring to efface the reality of science being a production of knowledge developing demonstrations and proofs internal to an historically specified materiality.14 In other words, this conception obscures the development of science through epistemological breaks. Logical models15 are superior inasmuch as what appears to be an analogous binary between empiricisms artifice-empirical couple in logics syntacticalsemantic dyad in fact reverses the relation. In logic semantics are the artifice, whereas syntax is the given. Carnapian logical positivism goes astray when it represents mathematics formal syntax as the corresponding formal compartment of science, and semantics as the application of this formalisation to a limited domain of empirical objects, which it models. In Badious demonstration logical positivism is thus exposed as an illegitimate, ideologically determined concept of model because it fails to recognize how the formal syntax (drawing on recursive algebra) and the semantic model (based in set theory) adjoin one another in an experimental dialectic wherein models take part in generating the syntactical systems of logic. As a consequence there is no pure, formal, or a priori knowledge.16 Ray Brassier rightly notes that in a single stroke Badiou thereby rejects the reduction of mathematics to both intuitionist a priori logic, and Quinean empirical relativism, by suggesting that logic itself be conceived as doubly articulated between syntactic system and semantic structure.17 The rejection of the transcendental priority of logic, results in the position that the double

articulation cannot be transplanted outside of mathematics or duplicated in the relation between a supposedly formal theory and its putatively material instantiation.18 New conceptual models come first, and their new formalisations are retroactively cast: the formalisation procedure working on ideology to affect a scientific rupture. In this way the lag between models and the revision of axioms provides access to the historical origins of epistemological breaks. New mathematical models cannot be derived from any one set of axioms, indicating a reciprocal dialectic. The reconfiguration of both levels allows the dialectical materialist a view into the creative genesis of new knowledge. Far from being simply an ideological notion, then, the model delivers a fertile epistemological category; the model is the ordinance that, in the historical process of a science, retrospectively assigns to the sciences previous practical instances their experimental transformation by a definite formal apparatus. In sum, The category of model thus designates the retroactive causality of formalism on its own scientific history.19 Badious approach illuminates one approach for resolving historical epistemologys unexplained procedure of how experimentation on ideology from within ideology can cause an incommensurable scientific break. Because of the consistency theorem (every consistent set of axioms admits a model), the theory of models necessitates a rupture within formalization. An easily graspable example is Poincars attempt to construct a model of Riemannian plane geometry out of a model based on the axioms of Euclidian geometry. If the famous Euclidean axiom through two points passes one and only one straight line is constructed in a model of a Euclidean sphere so that it becomes through two different, nondiametrically opposed points in the sphere, there passes only one great circle one can then deduce the non-existence of parallels axiom of Riemannian geometry. Reimannian geometry is then assured by the Euclidean model. This model, though, admitting both the retention and the negation of Euclids straight-line axiom, proves the independence of the

axiom, resulting in a defeat for Euclidean geometry which was necessary, and not a matter of circumstance... a matter of impossibility, and not impotence.20 Science breaks from ideology by releasing a truth, where the previous conception is proven inconsistent. Without a doubt Badious text represents the most sophisticated, technical application and nuancing of Althusserian dialectical materialism in its heyday. Where Althusser had only talked about what must be done to identify the science/ideology rupture, Badiou located within mathematical practice the resources proving a revisable, experimental site of rupture between logical syntax and semantic models. Within the realm of logics formal inscriptions he isolated a place free from ideology, yet around which ideology could cohere. Ideology is not mere deception or foolishness; it has a rational basis and only experimentation on ideology from within ideology can result in a dismembering of these axioms through the scientific break. If Concept of Model appears to present a fertile ground for further research with curiously few traces of succession, that is because, as Althusser observes in the Forward to the book, the lecture series in which it was delivered was interrupted by the events of May 1968. December that year, Althusser wrote that the somewhat theoreticist accents of this text hearken back to a bygone conjuncture ... a project that was happily interrupted.21 Recalling Althussers remarks in Elements of Self-Criticism regarding the attempt to deduce a speculative rationalist truth/error distinction between science and ideology where the class struggle was almost entirely absent, the same problem could equally, if not more greatly, be seen to haunt The Concept of Model, which despite perfunctory political incantations of bourgeois epistemology, proletarian theory, and such like, is an entirely rationalist treatise on the historical epistemology of scientific breaks within the mathematical sciences. This is not to say that these insights could not be put to political labour in the form of critiques of the supposed timeless axioms of neo-classical economics, and in other similar

cases, but the conception of the underlabouring role of politics to scientific truth is what 68 put into question (even if it will remerge two decades later in Being and Event in the desutured guise of politics as handmaiden to an events political truth). It is not the events of 68 per se, nor just Badious turn against Althusser which is so important for understanding subsequent developments in Badious theories. Rather, it is Badious particular reaction to 68 and his particular turn against Althusserianism which is pertinent and, in turn, constitutes two rival tendencies within continental political theory and philosophy to this day. In one corner, a certain post-structuralist, anti-Marxist, antiscientific reverence for vitalistic, phenomenological conceptions of politics (all the above exemplified, for example, by Diana Cooles version of new materialism), and on the other an ontological conception of militant truth thought from some of mathematics most complex resources in the late 19th to mid 20th century. For unlike other rebel Althusserians Badiou always maintained a commitment to truth and a highly formalistic philosophical approach. Despite the searing political disagreements of the 1970s, these loyalties, I argue, keep him closer to the original Althusserian project of which The Concept of Model is a tour de force exhibit. This violence in proximity is best put into context historically, in contrast to the pathways of other dissident Maoists who formed the Gauche Proleterriane (GP), and particularly in contrast to Rancires post-68 valorisation of democratic revolt. An examination of the causes and consequences of the political maelstrom that was May 68 is in order.

2.2 Implosions of 68 Despite many commentators rather tiring celebration of 68 as a defeat of the idea of Marxist revolution in favour of a world of single-issue NGO campaigning and resistance, they are nonetheless right to isolate in 68 an historical fork in the road of continuing pertinence

today.22 The legacy of 68 persists in defining the contours of contemporary politics: whether that is within the pedestrian discourse of parliamentary campaigns (Nicholas Sarkozys promising its erasure in the 2007 presidential campaign)23, or in the ideological and strategic repetitions within contemporary protest movements.24 What makes the French May events of 68 so significant? To answer this question in the broadest theoretical light, one needs to first set the scene of the historical particularites of France under de Gaulles leadership, and the Communist Partys integration with the status quo. Formerly taking advantage of its role in the French resistance movement to cement its revolutionary credentials, by 1968 the PCFs reputation was tarnished by their support for Frances ruthless suppression of the Algerian independence struggle earlier in the decade. Stalinist economism dominated the mindset of the PCF; at home their increasing reformism had led to seamless assimilation within the democratic, parliamentary machine. In combination with the Confdration gnrale du travail (CGT) they focused their energies on limited pay and condition demands above revolutionary agitation. The state of the PCF arguably provides a micropolitical exhibit of a more general macrosocio-political ossification of French politics under de Gaulle the countrys bureaucratic and educational structures were equally staid. In addition to the growing outrage accompanying the American prosecution of the Vietnam War reaching a barbaric zenith in 68, all these factors helped contribute to the considerable allure of Third Worldism and anticolonialism above that of orthodox Soviet Marxism for young militants in the student movement. Significant student and radical groups in the run up to 68 were the Union Nationale des tudiants de France (UNEF), who had earned their radical credentials with steadfast opposition to the Algerian war. The student group L'Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Lninistes (UJCML), counted Rancire, Victor Hugo, and Robert Linhart amongst its number.25 There were also the Situationists and Socialism or Barbarism who positioned themselves outside of the

Marxist box. Then there were those who stayed within the PCF like Althusser, Balibar, and Dominique LeCourt (the hardcore of the structural Marxist movement). Badiou, for his part, was before 1968 a member of the Parti Socialiste Unifi (PSU), which had also opposed the Algerian war. Excepting the avant garde and anarchist factions, the Maoist affinity cutting across these groups represented the main Marxist alternative to Soviet communism. Even as he was repeatedly forced to politically deny these leanings to retain his PCF membership, Althussers Maoist theoretical intimations held out a seductive fusion of structural Marxisms aesthetic of scientific certainty with the more voluntarist disposition associated with Maoism. So up until 68 Althussers programme was considered at least theoretically compatible with the swelling discontent. At the same time, Althussers directly political writings on Student Problems jarred with the student movements concerns insofar as he advised their further theoretical reflection on the science/ideology distinction, issuing a call for the subordination of petit bourgeois student desires to the properly working class revolutionary task. The position would soon backfire on Althussers prestige amongst the May radicals. With voluntarist momentum behind their actions, the student groups initiation of the May events upset traditional schemas whereby it should be the working class and their representative institutions performing the leading role. It took a week after May 68 erupted in street protests and barricades for the PCF and CGT to show any solidarity with the university insurrections by calling a general strike, therewith bringing the Maoist groups tardily in tow now they recognised working class struggle in the events. In tandem with the escalation of strikes throughout factories across France pushing their demands much deeper and also with a greater militancy than the PCF-CGT leadership, it left the traditional working class institutions trailing behind on all fronts. Althussers strategy of patient reform on the theoretical fringes of the PCF in preparation for it to regain a revolutionary disposition was

short-circuited by events on the ground. His quietism during this period was integral to the implosion of Althusserianism. The disillusionment was not only personal; for the Maoists it signalled the maladroit structuralist refounding of dialectical materialism, now associated with order, losing its revolutionary kudos. Jacques Rancires desertion from the Althusserian fold is emblematic of its implosion. Part of the UJC-ML, which gave up on prising Althusser away from the PCF after 68 one faction went on to form the GP after its dissolution in 69 in Althussers Lesson (1974) Rancire indicts the entire programme as an attempt to preserve philosophy Marxist philosophy in particular as the exclusive business of academically trained specialists, implying that production is the business of the workers, whereas history is too complex and affair for them, one they must entrust to the care of specialists from the Party and from Theory.26 Put into question by 68 was precisely the knowledge/power nexus; the events marked the appearance of politics in a new form in the question of knowledge, its power and its relationship to political power.27 As a signal of Althusserian complicity on the side of knowledge/power against the creative self-determination of the masses, Rancire notes that in the aftermath of the student revolts those university students who were cardcarrying members of the PCF were brandishing theoreticist texts as they called for the reestablishment of order at the university.28 These insights serve to put into question the politics of philosophers: its condition of possibility [...being] that it not put into question the despotic figure of scientific power. Althusserianisms legacy is far worse than mere quietism; rather, it bears the revisionist sign on the forehead of authoritarian leftism, which is precisely the kinship between repression-by-science and repression-by-the proletariat29 In this way, Rancire links Althussers revolutionary scientism back to

Zhadanovian/Lsyenokian proletarian science. In the UJC Rancire still detected traces of the Althusserian imprint, but in the standpoint of the Gauche Proltarienne he perceived a

positive new model where intellectuals renounce their role in a division of labour and simply fight alongside the masses against repressive state apparatuses.30 Those who stayed within the Althusserian paradigm, whilst pushing a militant platform he disparages as ultra-left Platonists. All this culminates in the lesson of 68 bearing a remarkably postmodernist overture. It is worth quoting at length. 1968

was no doubt the birth of a new figure of subversion, but it was also quite clearly the end of leftisms grand and totalizing discourse. The end, we might say, of the opposition of small communist worlds to the big one In 1969, it was still possible for leftists to encompass the anti-authoritarian uprising of Frances youth and the proletarian struggles with their unifying discourse [but] It is not just that these struggles which attack power in its varied and sometimes contradictory manifestations, present us with a multiplicity that makes achieving a synthesis more complicated. It is, more importantly, that they are themselves a multiplication of the discourses of struggle Marxism itself will continue to serve the ambiguous role it serves nowadays that of a system of multiple identifications, of the place where discourses of revolt meet and where the discourse of subversion is perennially being transformed into the discourse of order.31

68 was a moment of ideological dissimulation where the fracturing of the subjects of revolt into their own self-presentation transforms Marxism into the role of an ideological police force, attempting to re-present these disparate causes under subordination to the need for proletarian revolution led by a vanguard party. No matter how far Althusser later withdrew from many of his positions, he would obviously never go this far. But interestingly, Althusser

received the publication of Rancires book not unfavourably and echoed some of its themes later in the decade, denouncing extreme vanguard practice as reduplicating the bourgeois separation of knowledge and power.32 In line with the GPs abrogation of this role, in the early 1970s their members headed out to provincial factories in large numbers in order to agitate from within the working class. At the same time as their corporeal political engagements required a renunciation of aloof intellectualism, their theoretical work became curiously detached from reality they believed revolution to be just around the corner. After the GP wound up in 1974, their anti-authoritarian disposition quickly led to dtournement of Marxist militancy in general. Leading lights of the GP forged what became known as the new philosophy: a melange of recycled cold war memes about the brutality of authoritarian ideology and of the opposite need for a free world a turnaround earning them media praise from the likes of Time magazine, which featured their thought on a cover story announcing Marx is Dead. Badiou later referred to the new philosophers as enacting a Thermidorian reaction against the subjective sequence of 68. His remarks are important because they shed light on his alternative pathway from the event, which sought to reconcile the lessons of May with an ongoing commitment to the revolutionary cause in which these energies were situated avoiding its dissolution within the ex-post libertarian narrative. The Thermidorian renegades, Badiou writes, separated activism from every principle and every situation, and pretended that this activism was only ever connected with the Chinese or Soviet States. Their disloyalty to the singular novelty of the forms and principles of activism from 19681975 was based on making an irrational connection between these events and the worst atrocities of state crimes in the socialist states. What is the relation between the Stalinist camps of the 1930s and the blind and magnificent path that led thousands of young students to the factories of France? Or between Stalinism and the multiform invention of new

practices of declaration, demonstration and organisation?33 Recalling the era Badiou observes that amongst the fashionable milieu of the French ultra lefts leadership in the 1970s in particular, Serge July, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner and Andr Glucksman their abandonment of the revolutionary project and turn to the right was conditioned by their questionable motivation for involvement in revolutionary politics in the first place. Badiou cites the response to his inquiries as to why they all so suddenly quit: Because we understood we were not going to take power. He sees this as the reason for their sudden withdrawal the activities of the left: a blocked ambition the realization that it was going to take a great deal of trouble and hard work in a situation that was not all that promising.34 Badiou also blames the culture of the GP describing how there were a lot of young grand bourgeois in the GP, which made it reminiscent of the Russian anarchist movement Theirs was an adventurist and fallacious style of action, but one that was exciting at the same time, a politics that was also a fashion, its personal roots in actual fact not very deep.35 These observations help contextualise the difference between the GP and the Maoist organization Badiou joined in 1970, L'Union des communistes de France marxiste-lniniste (UCF-ML). The UCF-ML set itself in opposition to both the PCF and GP by arguing for the need for a Leninist party organisation that would engage and build upon the spontaneity of the masses. Opposing the communitarianism of the GP, it also argued for a strictly universalist line in its engagement with immigrant workers.36 So when Badiou described 68 as a genuine road-to-Damascus experience37 severing his connection with Althusserianism, it by no means implied a swing to the kind of Maoism exemplified by the GP. Instead, the theoretical paradox thenceforth required navigation between a scientific position that fetishized concepts, and a praxical position that fetishized action and the immediate ideas of its agents.38 Althusserianism on the one hand; the GPs anarcho-syndicalist sponteneism on the other. In the Maoism of the UCF-ML Badiou and his comrades called for the

organization of the masses, but the organization of the masses dialectically implied the power of disorganization. It was this original process of disorganization that unleashed, in an incredible newness, the possibility of this organization.39 Let us see how these concerns were reflected in his works of the 1970s and early 1980s.

2.3 Subject of the Break Badious publications of the 1970s can be considered tributary to his first grand treatise of 1982, Theory of the Subject. Accordingly, in Theory of Contradiction (1975) the emphasis on Maoist dialectics One splits into Two40 is pursued in order to redress the structuralist foreclosure of the subject: that is, how can dialectical antagonisms in a situation be thought without sliding into structural determinism?41 In Maos maxim it is right to be rebel against the reactionaries, Badiou writes, we find expressed the fact that Marxism, prior to being the full-fledged science of social formation, is the distillate of what rebellion demands: that one consider it right, that reason be rendered to it. The existence of a science of social formations bears no interest for the masses unless it reflects and concentrates their real revolutionary movement.42 The aim is thus to theoretically reflect a communist alternative to both the PCFs economism on the right and to also counter the temptation of anarchism on the left the latter remaining stuck at the level of the glorious revolt against the repressive state, failing to create a lasting displacement of the social order. By following through Badious use of formalism against deviations on both sides in order to think militant, subjectively induced change, the break from Althusser can be put in better perspective. A measure of the persistence of Althusserianism can then be registered against the more egregious ontological anarchism indicative of the dominant Deleuzian inspired alternatives. Or, as Badiou puts it in 1982, we must quickly ground all this in the ordered soil of structures, unless we let

ourselves evaporate into the metaphysics of desire, that is, the substantial and nomadic assumption of the outplace.43 For working through the paradoxes of order and change, Theory of the Subject promulgates the provocatively anti-Althusserian gesture of Theory of Contradiction by locating conceptual resources within Hegelian dialectics. In keeping with the Maoist splitting of the dialectic Badiou bifurcates his structural (note, not structuralist) dialectic into two dialectically conjoined, yet split, operations: one taking the place of the objective, the other the force of the subjective. His investigation thereby aims at conceiving how a militant, subjective, political intervention can apply sufficient force to reconfigure its previously objective place (the strategy of the UCF-ML figured in ontology). And equally, lest two compact to one again in the Stalinist party-state, how can the logic of places and the logic of forces be articulated without fusion?44 If in this approach one can perceive something like Badious analysis of how experimentation on model semantics can dismember their logical syntax (see 2.1) indeed, Badiou pre-emptively counters the claim that this is a [dialectical] syntax of little interest from the moment that the semantics of it [are] forced 45 it points to continuities with the Althusserian epistemic break. Because as much as the analysis of structuralist objectivity is inverted by Badiou to the place of the subjective, this is only accomplished through their (structured) dialectic, touching upon the enduring rational kernel between Althussers vanishing cause of structural causality and Badious later explicit formalisation of Being and Event. Like Althusser, Badious structural dialectic differentiates the One and whole (analogously to the structuralist dialectical replacement of totality with whole). But unlike Althusser, Badiou seeks to find the subjective channel for the absent cause of novel breaks. Thus, the absent cause is always reintroduced into the whole of its effect. This is a major theorem of the structural dialectic: in order for the causality of lack to exert itself, all terms

must be split.46 The difference, let us emphasize once more, therefore rests in Badious inversion to a theory of the subject where political change is disentangled from its dependence upon scientific analysis of objective conditions in order to act politically, in favour of a formal discourse of subjective intervention. Bosteels seizes the crux of Theory of the Subjects dialectic of the subjective and the objective:

Between Althusser and Badiou, in fact, we might say that a decisive reversal of perspective takes place whereby the absent cause, instead of providing us with the master key to unlock the structural causality of overdetermination, becomes synonymous with the transformative potential of an event. The economical instance, which for Althusser serves as the principle example of a cause that vanishes into the totality of its effects, thus continues to be present as it were virtually in Badious doctrine of the event, except that the emphasis now shifts away from the structural dimension towards the rarity of a subjective intervention.47

Even as political economy is displaced by Badious emphasis on the application of subjective force, his use of abstraction to think the correct line on the subjective level nonetheless marks a form of succession with the scientific Marxist and Althusserian traditions. Likewise, Badious dialectics are configured so not to fall into the parlous teleological circularities to which Althussers epistemology took exception. Hegels Logic is materialist for Badiou only insofar as it posits no simple contradiction in alienation so that the end would be contained in the beginning, or vice versa.48 He locates the dialectical split (scission) in a fundamental operation repeated throughout the Logic, which is glossed over and hidden by virtue of its sheer ubiquity. This is how Badiou rescues a materialist dialectic from Hegel; the materialist

dialectic periodizes, while the other one makes circles.49 Infinitely recursive, hence properly periodizing dialectics (permitting no teleology), follow from the positing of the something and the something-other. The two terms represent not the simple contradiction/union of opposites but rather a gap between being and being-placed similar to Heideggers demarcation of the ontological and the ontic.50 The syntax and semantics are laid out with deceptive simplicity: A pure being Ap being-placed A = (AAp) operation of scission From this hidden Hegelian operation where One splits into Two according to the placement of pure being, Badiou demonstrates the possibility of deriving an unexpectedly complex differentiation of the pathways for change and its impediments. Novelty is forged when placed-being acts to determine being itself Ap(A). Badiou puts this in contrast to the dialectical relapse (Ap(Ap) = P) of PCF revisionism, in which the communist project of abolishing the space in which a proletariat can exist is replaced by a static opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat, each sustaining one another. This too is the principle of structuralism in all its forms.51 Yet again the parallel with Althusser asserts itself: for where in high Althusserianism the epistemic break of science from ideology was thought with respect to sciences release of new truths against ideology as repetition, the same wager which will continue to underwrite the ontology of Being and Event mandates that every rightness and every justice are, in principle, novelties; and that everything that repeats itself is invariably unjust and inexact.52 The event issues from the qualitative concentration of subjective force to reconfigure the status quo in a genuinely new formation. With the concentration of force necessary for destroying the existing structures of the old order and discharging novelty criteria for periodization [...are] required in terms of divergence, between the opposition place/force and

the opposition objective/subjective, for the clear arrangement of the paths of the subject.53 What is this if it is not a reinvention of structural formalism with its attention fixed on the subjective side of the equation? The previous section argued that Badious idea of the event in many regards stays more loyal to the original programme of Althusserian structural Marxism than Althusser himself did in his aleatory materialist writings of the 1980s. There is no better demonstration of this than their respective reflections on Epicurus and the privileged term in the schema of void, atom and clinamen. For whereas Althusser in Underground Current attempts to push his aleatory paradigm to its limit by locating the source of all change in the void conjoint to his own ambitions to empty out (void) philosophy Badiou stays much closer to early Althusserian project by isolating the necessity of contingency in the structural dialectic between the terms. Badiou singularly stresses that the void cannot be constitutive of the chance ordering of a world since it is in absolute difference to atoms. The difference is so strong between void and atoms that nothing happens. Rather, both the void enabling the atomic rain, and the clinamen which provides a deviation necessary for anything to assemble into a world, represent vanishing terms. The clinamen is the absent cause whose effect is the retroactive effacement of the cause because after the collision of the atoms the clinamen no longer has anything to do with what happens and it is in vain that you would search the world for an atom marked by the stigmata of deviation. All atoms are identical, the one affected by the clinamen no longer bears any trace of it.54 Hence, Chance is a key concept in any structural dialectic... For us, it is true that history is the fortune of the event, never to be confused with politics, which is forced subjective rationality. It is fully in keeping with Marxism to say that history is the chance of political necessity. 55 In contrast, by laying the stress on chance without his corresponding earlier criteria for differentiating events from nonevents Althussers later writings abdicate thinking the rationality necessary to realise lasting

change by instead placing responsibility at the feet of the voids self sufficient production of the new. Although writing before Althusser, and long before Althussers aleatory materialist writings would be published, Badiou could be directly rejoining Althusser when he writes In the structural dialectic, the qualitative difference in which force emerges is not a nothingness. It is a disappearance whose effect is the Whole from which it has disappeared.56 Neither the void nor the clinamen are productive of change, because identifying them as subject seeks to do away with the force needed to act upon chance events. In a remark that is crucially important to cite for redressing misreadings of Badious later theory of the event as a miracle summoned out of an omnipotent ontological void, Badiou derides the fixation on the clinamen as the source of change (rather than a mere pre-condition) in consideration of the implication that this requires an outplace that verges on the miraculous, in opposition both to the monotonous fall of atoms, of which the void is the cause, and to the laws that will govern, subsequent to the clinamen, the composition of the Whole.57 No more need be said regarding the persistence of the Althusserian idea of the absent cause of change in Badious theory of the subject. A few more words are however still necessary on Badious references to mathematics, which prefigures the ontologisation of mathematics in Being and Event to think a new conception of the subject one not necessarily at odds with Marxist materialism. Badious attempted reconciliation of the ontological predominance of the Two with the materialist, monist thesis that only matter exists is the site of the theoretical encounter where the anticipation of the function mathematics will be asked to perform in Being and Event can be found. Like Althusser, Badiou presents materialism as an ontological quarrel exceeding the 19th century lineage of Marx, Engels and Darwin in turning the world on its feet after the idealism of Hegel and Berkeley. In his reckoning, materialism is an axiomatic position stretching back to Lucretius: There is the One is the monist thesis about being, for

which matter in reality is only the signifier. Every materialism posits the primitive unicity of being, with the implication that its intimate constitution requires only one name. Matter is this name.58 Drawing upon the Marxist inversion of Hegelian idealism to materialism as a demonstration of the inadequacy of the reductionist materialist procedure insofar as it denies thoughts role in renouncing its distinction from matter Badiou seeks to show the limits of what he calls the soothing vulgarity of yester-years materialisms.59 As Salanskis also frames the materialist paradox: what the materialist calls matter must mean something more determinate than being, in order for its annexation of the beings that ideality lays claim to make sense.60 Thus implied is the question of the status of mathematical objects in the doctrine of materialism.

In order to invert Hegel, we need the Two of inversion. The head and the feet, the idea and matter. How else could we posit the antecedence of one over the other In order to distinguish itself from idealism, materialism is forced to abdicate its essential axiom, which is monism, and to posit the thesis of all major idealisms, namely, that there are indeed two regions of being That is what Marx summarizes as follows: Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other. We posit that materialism exists in the recognition of two theses, one of which names being and the other its order an order whose being lies in a vanishing nominal overhaul: The thesis of identity: being is exclusively matter The thesis of primacy: matter precedes thought, and not the other way around.61

These theses are, of course, precisely Althussers from Lenin and Philosophy. The key point that matter precedes thought does not, however, mean according ontological pre-eminence to matter:

Primacy here does not mean ontological hierarchy, or pre-eminence, since there exists only matter. It is nothing like the Platonist superiority of the intelligible, subject to inversion. Primacy means that, in the process of knowledge that founds the thesis of identity, the eclipse of thought stands under the law of being, and not under that of thought itself. The two theses of materialism give structure to the metaphorical division of the process of knowledge. Therein lies the real efficacy of their opposition.62

The split into Two is conceived as metaphorical. Thus he can say, whilst maintaining the monism of materialism, that materialism is dialectical is an understatement. It is entirely traversed by the dialecticity of the dialectic, its double occurrence as structure and as history.63 Badiou continues to draw an analogy between the dialectic of asymptote and reflection and algebra and topology. The fact that despite the best efforts of 20th century mathematicians algebra and set theory have proved irreducible to one another is considered metaphorically equivalent to the procedure of materialism in attempting to assert that only matter exists, thereby occluding the paradoxical role of thought in the statement. The Two matter, thought; asymptote, reflection; algebra and topology are more than the sum of their parts, they operate to form an enigmatic excess over one another. It is here that in Theory of the Subject Badiou moves closest to his ontology in Being and Event, pivoting on the powersets excess of inclusion over belonging. Also anticipating another crucial idea for Being and

Event within the same problematic: It is well known that the notion of the set of all sets is inconsistent. Similarly, the concept of an integral material totality is only a porous fantasy of materialism, its dejection turned back into idealism.64 Badiou uses the formal irresolution of algebra and set theory to demonstrate the necessity of a subject a demand Being and Event will answer to exacting mathematical standards. In Theory of the Subject mathematics is nevertheless accorded no privileged ontological role; drawing on Lacan it remains simply a precise tool of political formalisation. Precision put into the razor of the Marxist barber, mathematics is that unalterable blade with which one ends up bleeding the pigs to death.65 The next section will examine the consequences of the ontologisation of mathematics for Badious politics in the context of his changing conceptions of the temporality and preferable forms of political organization. Approaching the crux of this chapter, both the decision to equate ontology with the forbidding formal discipline of mathematics, and the complex philosophical demarcation of ontological and non-ontological situations will sharpen the question of the subject and to what extent the existence of a subject requires a theorist of subjectivity (a Subject of subjects) to provide impetus for change?

2.4 On the Subject of Being and Event Badious 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event, takes to newly baroque heights his formalisms of the subjective procedures of order and change. But let us begin by reflecting upon the conjoined political and philosophical shifts separating the text from its predecessor. Significant in this respect is the fact that Badiou justifies his mathematical turn in a way departing from the politically determined discourse of Theory of the Subject. On the corresponding level of his personal political commitments this move coincided with the formation of the post-Leninist and post-Maoist LOrganisation Politique a group established

with former UCF-ML comrades in 1985 to pursue politics without a party. In no unclear terms the gap between philosophy and politics formerly fused to at least some degree by intellectuals operating within political parties, including even the more experimental UCF-ML was widened both at the theoretical and praxical level. So whereas in Theory of the Subject every subject was considered political (including, it is safe to assume, the philosophical), now discrete practices in the new lingo, the four truth procedures: scientific, artistic, political, and amorous significantly exclude philosophy as a truth bearing discourse.66 The ascription of philosophy qua philosophy as a discourse subservient to the demands of these truth procedures should thus be seen to reflect a subtly changing sense of the political role of philosophers. For by circumscribing philosophy to a metaontological station in thinking the subjective procedures of truth creating practices themselves dependent upon, and constitutive of, truths released by events Badiou at once appears to limit philosophys scope but at the same time grants it an ability to make global judgements on the conditions and forms of change. Now, whilst this gesture appears to mark an even sharper discontinuity within the Althusserian tradition than the Maoist formalisms of subjectivity from the 1970s and early 80s, many commentators on Badious early period that it in fact argue continues to resonate Althusserian themes. Luke Zachary Fraser, for one, identifies the way non-philosophical truth procedures create splits in the regime of knowledge as the Badiouian successor to the Althusserian epistemological break. And also as a mark of continuity from the 1970s period, Bosteels describes how the dialectical rapport between truth and knowledge is precisely the place of inscription of most of Badious debts to Maoism.67 But to gauge a more accurate register of the continuity and discontinuity of this turn viz. Althusserianism, it is informative to compare Badious mid-1980s change of direction to both the pre and post corrections of theoreticism, which splits Althussers corpus at 1967. Relevant for our present discussion is

how Althussers post-67 swing towards conceiving philosophy as class struggle in theory compacted philosophys reflections on different practices to a singularly political register; but by so doing continued to stress the political necessity of theoretical work. In this sense Badious new conception of the subjects of different practices marks a return to the pre-67 high Althusserian programme of thinking finite, discrete practices conditioning one anothers development through epistemological breaks. Yet in another sense, inasmuch as Badious deliberately excludes philosophy as a truth procedure, he also affirms Althussers post-67 correction of theoreticism from Lenin and Philosophy onwards, whereby philosophy was posited as having no object of its own. If there is no strict homology with any one period of Althusserianism, then, it nevertheless establishes Badious continuing negotiation of different tendencies within the overall problematic. Accordingly, even if the prioritization of the subjective in Theory of the Subject is further radicalised by Being and Events total subtraction from any objective ground history, economics, etc. in favour of a metaontological theory of subjectivity (the faithful forcing of truths out inconsistencies manifest at particular sites) it will still have a hard time defending the claim that this conceptualisation of subjectivity does not in fact continue to endow the philosopher with some sort of conceptual knowledge to judge, and indeed, effect, the truth procedures of post-evental politics. The take home point from this comparison with Althusser is that Badious 1988 desuturing of philosophy from politics is intimately tied to rethinking of the role of philosophers viz. political practice. As such one should turn to the reconception of the subject to understand the philosophical-political reciprocity at work here. Within the justificatory preamble to Being and Event the fact that Badiou lists no overt political conditions should not be taken to naively imply that this is a lack without symptomatic significance. Two of these conditions are:

1. A third epoch of science. Not demonstrative mathematics, nor the mathematization of physics, but a split, through which the very nature of the base of mathematical rationality reveals itself, as does the character of the decision of thought which establishes it.68 2. A second epoch of the subject. A subject not as a founding centre of thought as in the Cartesian tradition; one which can only be thought in terms of its role in processes with rigorous conditions. Or, in short, conditions which combined pose the question: given pure mathematics being the science of the being, how is a subject possible? A question asked in order to correct Theory of the Subjects politically determined presupposition that there was some

subjectivization.69 The subject will thenceforth be proved through an ontological decision to affirm mathematical rigour against Heideggerian romanticism a gesture appearing to mark an extension of the Althusserian project by promulgating the spirit of French scientific rationalism.70 However, in order that conceiving the subject through this intellectually aristocratic practice not lend itself to elevated notions of Platonic philosopher kings whose mathematical abilities endow them with unique qualifications for understanding existence, order and the subjects for change the concept of the event, as a fully extra-ontological, subjectively-named happening, works to disqualify any mathematical premonitions within concrete situations, restricting its gaze only to the most abstract ontological reflections. As Badiou would put it explicitly a decade after Being and Event was published: While philosophy is all about identifying what ontology is in an endlessly reviewed process, it is also the general theory of the eventand it is no doubt a special theory too... Philosophy is the theory of what is strictly impossible for mathematics.71 To wit, a theory of the subject. The event serves, within Badious subtractive ontology, precisely to philosophically sever the claim of philosophers to predict, organise, and delimit the right revolutionary moment within

non-ontological situations, as the former structuralists of the PCF were alleged to have pretended during 68. The event is perfectly egalitarian viz. intellectual authority insofar as when it breaks out it provides a happening that comes seemingly from nowhere it is a pure chance supplement to the manifold situation for which it is an event.72 No vanguard party or small cadre or professional activists, nor the state, NGOS or thinktanks, could predict its explosion within a situation. Political discipline is rather shifted to the procedures taking place after the fact of the emergence of aleatory inconsistencies in the regime of presentation. Only once the event disrupts the seeming stability and completeness of an order of knowledge lies the possibility for a subject. But as we will see, the net result retains a disavowed role for the philosopher as what could be described as the Subject of subjects in making judgements on what counts as a true event an imperative that troubled Badiou enough to claim one of the loose ends of Being and Event was philosophically distinguish[ing] [an] event from an important fact or from a becoming.73 By the later meditations, too, the intellectual intrusions of the philosopher metaontologist into non-philosophical truth procedures will deepen when Cohens forcing technique is used to prove the freedom of subjective intervention to extend the situation. Because within Cohens constructible ground model of set theory, the excess of inclusion over belonging is reduced to a minimum by the models cardinal transitivity. The structural conditions to provide the possibility of an event are lost; and therewith the egalitarian, prereflective happening providing an impetus for change within any non-ontological situation for non-philosophical subjects. The upshot, I hope to demonstrate, is that true change requires the philosophical metaontologist to suggest the possibility of transformation. Rather than launch straight into the complex and technical architecture of Badious treatise to deduce the above points, let us, however, start by paying attention to the

Introduction in order to sharpen our appreciation of why the category of the event determines the choice to identify mathematics with ontology and, in particular, privileging of set theory.

2.5 Mathematics = ontology Badiou emphasizes that establishing the philosophical decision identifying mathematics with ontology is in no way the books goal; instead this book founds a doctrine [...that] institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as a fragment of the process of a truth. 74 Yet curiously few readings of the book seemed to have paid much attention to Badious professed intention to establish a new theory of the subject. In an edited collection of essays by all the leading lights of continental philosophy, none address Badious theory of the subject per se. Adrian Johnston, one of the most prolific commentators on Badious work, places the treatises lex causae in legislation over the Parmenedian injunction to decide between the One or the Many. Regardless of Badious intentions, Ray Brassier, sees Badious accomplishment almost entirely in terms of the way the opening meditations establish equality between mathematics and ontology.75 Brassier even goes so far to airbrush out Badious reconceptualisation of the subject, isolating only the way that the identification of axiomatic set theory with the long sought for science of being qua being... affirms a fidelity to the Cantor-event.76 Apart from Peter Hallwards appropriately titled Badiou: A Subject to Truth, most readers understate the centrality of rethinking the subject for the choice to identify the discourse of Being with the elaboration of set theory across the 20th century in turn often downplaying the freedom of philosophical metaontology to determine its own conditions and its choice of an appropriate ontology. A few words therefore appear necessary on the compulsions lying behind Badious equation of ontology with mathematics in light our emphasis on how the decision marshals philosophy towards a new theory of the subject. This involves situating the fidelity of Badiou to Albert Lautmans conception of how mathematics

serves ontological questions. And this for the purpose of understanding Being and Events use of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory to establish: (1) a new theory of the subject, and (2) the philosophical metaontologists separation from the truth procedures arising from nonontological situations.

Badious ontological Platonism asserts that Being is inconsistent multiplicity. In the phenomenal world of particular things this multiplicity cannot be perceived or intuited: not empirically, nor through any mystical apprehension. Philosophical questions are best approached through the formal thought of mathematics, free from linguistic contamination or empiricist temptations. The world we inhabit is a world of specific things, and if we want to think Being in its multiplicity we have to subtract from all these to think presentation as such: that is, the presentational form of any-thing; and conversely, what presentation excludes as a necessity i.e. Being, the inconsistent multiple which is not. With its very abstract rigour mathematical discourse thinks presentation, and nothing more. Badious philosophical metaontology77 (thinking the presentation of presentation) is thus not a thesis about the world but about discourse.78 From where could Badiou have drawn inspiration for this idea? There are few references provided by the text, but amongst the thin smattering Albert Lautmans (c. 19081944) name recurs. Lautmans writings are nothing less than admirable and what I owe to them, Badiou admits, even in the very foundational intuitions for this book, is immeasurable.79 Lautman was a French philosopher of mathematics with a close working relationship with the mathematician Jean Cavaills (c. 1903-1944), both killed in the same year by the Nazis because of their involvement in the French resistance movement. Lautman can be considered part of the movement of the French rationalist philosophy of science; he cited Bachelard and emphasized the creative development of mathematics against Russells

logicism. In The Concept of Model one can already note an affinity with Lautman in Badious model theoretic critique of logical positivism. By placing logic on the same level as other forms of mathematics in the order of genesis of new structures within mathematics, Zamalea observes how Lautman prefigures ... our conception of logic as it arises from model theory, in which a logic is not only determined, but even defined ( la Lindstrm) by an adequate collection of structures.80 With respect to the idea prevalent within logicism that a rich enough logical or axiomatic essence could account for the entire existence of structures of mathematics, Lautman counters that we always see a mode of structuration of a basic domain interpretable in terms of existence for certain new entities, functions, transformations, numbers, that the structure of a domain thus appears to perform.81 Yet as Badiou recalls in an interview with Tzuchien Tho, at the time of writing the Concept of the Model Lautmans works were largely unavailable; only with their publication in the 1970s did Badiou gain any contact with the texts.82 There should be no surprise, then, that Lautmans speculative contribution on the nature of mathematics can more evidently be seen to inform Badious identification of mathematics as ontology in the 1980s. Taking inspiration from a curiously unanthropomorphic reading of Heidegger, Lautmans participatory Platonism conceives mathematics in relation to philosophical metaphysics within a tripartite scheme. Dialectical questions whole/part, continuity/discontinuity, etc. give rise to questions of the why, to which Ideas serve to form connections to attempt to answer them. Mathematics then fills in these ideas with more concrete, particular and precise ideas. The anteriority of dialectical questions to mathematical development permits the posterior recovery of ideas from their mathematical exploration.

While the mathematical relations describe the connections that in fact exist between distinct mathematical entities, the Ideas of dialectical relations are

not assertive of any connection whatsoever that in fact exists between notions. Insofar as posed questions, they only constitute a problematic relative to the possible situations of entities... the Ideas that constitute this problematic are characterized by an essential insufficiency, and it is yet once again in this effort to complete understanding of the Idea, that more concrete notions are seen to appear relative to the entity, that is, true mathematical theories.83

Easily discernable are the similarities to Badious conception of mathematical Platonism where all that we can know, and can ever know of being qua being, is set out, through the meditation of a theory of pure multiplicity by the historical discursively of mathematics.84 This goes to explain why the Parmenedian dialectic of the One inaugurates the meditational procession of Being and Event. In another way, too, it clarifies the relationship of Badious philosophy to the work of pure mathematicians, who he positions as working ontologists. In Badious view there is no spontaneous philosophy of the mathematicians worth guarding in the same way that Althusser insisted scientists need to be protected against the incursions of idealism. As he would later carefully delineate the point: although mathematicians spontaneous philosophy is Platonism, unlike his own Platonism it is an erroneous conception based on Aristotelian tenets, whereby the ideal spectacle of its results follow from fictive activiation.85 Platonism of this Godelian kind he believes is a bit too dogmatic, and especially so when contrasted against Lautmanian Platonism: that is, a Platonism of participation of the sensible in the ideal, centred on the dialectic of ideas in the history of mathematics. 86 If mathematicians philosophy of their practice is not to be trusted, neither should their spontaneous practice be credited with immediately releasing philosophical insight. On the

contrary, the trust working mathematicians place in solving specific problems is in principle unproductive when it comes to any rigorous description of the generic essence of their operations87 that is, to extracting the metaontological consequences of the ideas mathematics works on with great exactitude. In this regard, a mathematician like Paul Cohen would likely assume heroic stature for Badiou insofar as he renounced any philosophic pretensions and gained his advances in the field of independence proofs by desuturing the inhibitions of Gdelian Platonism from set theory to see how, in Cohens words, ideas which at first seemed merely philosophical could actually be made into precise mathematics.88 Similarly, Cohens scathing comments on those rare moments in history where philosophers seek to insert themselves within mathematical practice to intra-mathematically clarify philosophical questions would probably also gain Badious approval. In this vein, Cohen describes Russell and Whiteheads Principia Mathematica as totally unreadable, and in my opinion of very little interest.89 Mutatis mutandis, ideas and techniques that seem only mathematical (without any attempt to imbue them with ontological significance) can then be transcribed backwards, la Lautman, to inform philosophical questions. It follows that Badious focus on set theory as an ontological discourse is not reducible to simply following the cutting edge practice or the philosophy of the unconscious ontologists; it is rather a site for the extra-mathematical composition of the multiple conditions of an era. Badiou readily admits that by the time of writing in 1988 set theory was no longer considered the most fundamental, general or exciting field of mathematical development. His choice of set theoretic ontology is instead a philosophical attempt to weld the post-Cantorian era of science with a new idea of the subject.90 Although the imperative is for philosophy to stay broadly up to date with the mathematical resources it draws upon, there is certainly room to manoeuvre depending upon the philosophical questions at hand, which philosophers are free to determine themselves. This observation provides an important corrective to the common beginners

misreading of Badiou which believes that just because set theory was considered foundational for large parts of the 20th century, ergo Badious specification of it as the ontological discourse must be transitive with its status within the mathematics community. Following this misattribution, the existence of, and arguably superior rival for, the foundational prize within contemporary mathematics category theory is then taken to expose the bad faith of the irreducibly philosophical identification with set theory. But these objections are already anticipated by Badious careful justifications for adopting set theory. Admittedly, Badious own shift away from ontological theorising of the subject in later years exemplified by the section on the typology of subjects in the Logics of Worlds, disjoint from the topological heart of the Greater Logic has served to lend the impression that foundational (intramathematical) considerations are central to his allegiance to set theorys articulation of being qua being. Occasionally, he has even seemed to slide towards this position when, for example, he admits that I had to come to terms with Set Theorys rival theory regarding mathematical foundations: category theory.91 But at least on the terrain of Being and Events justification of its use of mathematics, following how developments in set theory lead towards a metaontology of the subject is quite unambiguous: from the opening remarks of the Introduction to the way the Meditations culminate in an interpretation of Paul Cohens forcing technique. That said, let our own judgement on Badious success stand or fall with whether this new idea of the subject maintains or undermines the understudy role Badiou claims to allot the philosopher in merely drawing out the metaontological conclusions of extraphilosophical practices. So that no prior knowledge of the text is assumed, this will involve a rather arduous, if unavoidable, exposition of the main sections of Being and Event, before arriving at the crux of the argument with the section dealing with Cohens forcing technique.

***

The axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory provide the tripartite specifications of Being, Event and Subjective Intervention for Badious mathematical ontology. These moments are chronologically synchronous with the development of set theorys axioms and techniques across the 20th century, from Zermelo to Paul Cohen. The axioms of Being are referenced to the less contentious early 20th century axioms, in contrast to the more controversial additions later on such as to the axiom of choice (forming ZFC), Gdels proof of the consistency of constructability, and leading up to Cohens early 1960s method of forcing. Given the limited space to present Being and Events dense metaontological reading of the development of set theory, ahead of the exposition the table below summarises the three main movements of the text and their relation to set theorys axioms, the mathematical ideas they embody, and their philosophical interpretations divided in this way to reflect how Badious take on mathematics reflects Lautmans. In the paragraphs which follow I rapidly abridge the main moments of the books mathematical ontology in order to take us as quickly as possible to the theory of the event and the subject, where the greatest attention will be fixed. That is, on two crucial sections: the partitive excess of inclusion over belonging in any structured presentation (the vanishing structural cause of the event thought through the Cantor-Easton theorem), and the subjects role in forcing truth out of the situation (Cohens theory of forcing).

Architectural map of Being and Event Main movements and their ZF-C axioms, mathematical and philosophical Ideas

Axiom

Mathematical Idea

Philosophical Idea

Being

Separation

Sets existence is given. No

direct

access

to

Being.

{
Power-set

The language separates Determines sets ontic existence. sets relations. The power-set p(a) of Theorem of excess: there is at least any set (a) has more one element included in the state parts; its cardinality is that does not belong to any greater. situation.

Event

Foundation

Sets cannot belong to The event is non-ontolologial: its themselves: ~(a a). self-belonging is prohibited by set theory.

Intervention (Subject)

Constructability

All of set theory can be Axiom of foundation redundant; rendered in a axiom of choice more a theorem of well ordering. All excess banished. Constructability is the form of knowledge.

{
Infinity

constructible universe.

There exist infinite sets.

The actual infinite is decided. Infinite sets necessary for axiom of choice, for unnameable multiples.

Choice

function

of

an Form of intervention. Arbitrary

element of any set can choice of an unnameable element. be decided to represent it. (N/A) Forcing the Form of the generic. Theory of the

indiscernible to exist. Subject to truth. Creating a generic

extension of the ground model, where theorems about the indiscernable can be made verifiable or not.

a. Being The absence of a definition of a set within the ZF axioms is the crucial starting point for understanding Badious ontology since it immediately rules out any primordial definien of Being.92 Axiomatic set theory is rather structured presentation which prohibits the presentation of Being so to not fall to pieces under the weight of its own inconsistencies (large paradoxical sets, such as those exposed by Russells paradox). There is therefore a double move involved in Badious interpretation of Being within axiomatic set theory. On the one hand, the axiom of separation, whereby all sets are constructed out of other sets, prescribes a mathematical language foreclosing any direct access to Being, because every existent is already assumed. Sets are simply given; the language of presentation (set theory) merely separates out existents and structures their relations. On the other hand, in any situation other than ontology the inconsistent multiple (the paradoxes the axiomatic is designed to suppress) are equated with Being, because it is ruled out from presentation within any structure. In a Heideggerian turn of phrase: the ontic givenness of consistent sets is taken to imply an ontology of inconsistent Being. However, the operation by which structure renders inconsistent Being invisible is retrospectively graspable by ontology; its outlawed inconsistency may be a nothing within any situation, but for ontology it is not a non-being93 (Badiou opposes this distinction to structuralism, which conflates the two). The inability

within any structured situation to pre-emptively identity this nothing within the structure is one of the primitive conditions for the event. The imperceptible, inconsistent nothing within any situation Badiou terms the void, and following set theorists inscription of the empty set he represents it with the symbol to reinforce that this nothing is strictly unpresentable except as a lack. Ontology is only a theory of the void, because if ontology presented the other terms in its presentation of presentation it would put the void on the same level of structured presentation alongside every other inscription; ontology would collapse to mere presentation of structure rather than delving deeper into the unstructured Being of structure.94 The axiom of the powerset opens up a distinction for ontology to grasp this non-presentable existence of the void. The axiom prescribes the absolute excess of inclusion over belonging . Belonging is the count forming the structure of the presentation of a situation, whereas inclusion operates as the meta-structure, or the state of the situation the count of the multiples of the multiples (or, sets of sets) forming a re-presentation greater than the initial multiples. In a play on words designed to establish metaphorical affinity with the Marxist revolutionary tradition, the power-set is described as a representational state. Marxist thought relates the State directly to sub-multiples rather than to terms of the situation By consequence, as a political programme, the Marxist proposes the revolutionary suppression of the State; thus the end of representation and the universality of simple presentation. The excess of representational inclusion over presentational belonging a dialectic which is knotted together95 lays the road to Badious new theory of the subject. It is a significant point to reflect upon because it undermines some critical readings of Badious theory in terms of a quasi-Kantian division between noumenon and phenomenon96 (notwithstanding the fact that there is not a trace of phenomenology here). Albeit true that Badiou maintains two levels in his inconsistent-Being/consistent-presentation ontology, with

only the latter perceptible for inhabitants of a situation, because the void is universally included97 within meta-structure/re-presentation (the power-set) its presence as an empty set (as a nothing {}) is implicated in the gap between sets belonging and included in a situation. What could have been a potentially static juxtaposition of ontological inconsistent multiplicity with structured, consistent presentation possesses a dialectical inflection from the initial axioms of ZF onwards. Badious distinction between nature and historical events clarifies the above point in the assertion and this seems to be nothing more than an assumption based on a very classical philosophical Idea of Nature98 that natural multiples are ordinals.99 These sets transitivity from one to the other is premised on the maximal coincidence of belonging and inclusion: there is no ordinal included which also does not also belong to another ordinal. With the atomism implicated by the transitivity of ordinals a halting point for the properties of ordinals beneath which there is no more fundamental substratum the void is universally included but has no dynamic to leave a mark in the gap between the meta-structure of inclusion (the power-set) and the structure of belonging (presentational set). Nature is in static equilibrium because of its ordinal numerary structure, hence leaves no room for events and subjects. Badiou concludes that it is thus true that nature and number are substitutable.100 Naturalisation should not, however, be regarded as solely referring to the stability of the nonhuman order; Badiou also sees the re-statification following an event as a process of normalisation/naturalisation. Historical events are not demarked by the human as opposed to the non-human; natural stability is the norm of human history too only the singular interruption of events (historicity proper) breaks the equilibrium. Solely by historical events can the natural order be unsettled. These happen at evental sites where a multiple asserts itself: a multiple in which none of the elements are presented in a situation. When the evental site is counted within a situation it has the void as its minimal point of singularity, which is why

Badiou speaks of it as on the edge of the void. How this conception does not end up reduplicating the inert atomism of natural ordinals will lead all the way to Badious crowning theory of the subject. But for a subject, first an event. b. Event Critical for proper comprehension of Badious theory of the event is the coimplication of evental-sites (singularities produced by the structure) and events themselves. The evental site produces the conditions for an event, yet does not necessitate an event.101 In what appears to be a rather redundant prohibition given that the theory of natural multiples as transitive ordinals blocks the excess of inclusion necessary for an evental site, Badiou confirms once and for all that there are no natural events, nor are there neutral events. In natural or neutral situations, there are solely facts.102 Badiou does not waver in insisting that the existence of the event through subjective force is predicated on the thinking being making it so. Significant for enabling the subjective procedures which will maintain the event, the event is the first non-ontological concept introduced in the text. It is prohibited by the ZF axiom of foundation, one of the main consequences of which is that no set can belong to itself. Thus, the events non-ontological matheme of self-belonging means that the event both belongs as a nomination of itself (ex) and of its site within a situation (X):

ex = {x X, ex]

[T]he event is a one-multiple made up of, on the one hand, all the multiples which belong to its site, and on the other hand, the event itself.103. If this appears to establish the event as a transcendent eruption, supernumerary to the situation, the meditations of B&E devoted to the event (16-18) do little to establish any contrary impression a lacunae which is only corrected later in the text with the theory of forcing, and even then, as we will see, inadequately.

Nonetheless, the event, even if an inexplicable eruption from the standpoint of an inhabitant of a non-ontological historical situation, still demands subjective intervention because of undecideability regarding whether it belongs to the situation. It is not enough to say there has been an event, rather the wager of the event is to affirm that it belongs to a situation, when nothing of the event is presented in the situation. At this point in Badious exposition the events nomination obeys no law; the events indeterminacy founds its non-founding. The split within the matheme of the event between the event and its site hearkens back to Theory of the Subjects notion of scission: if one only affirms the site, nothing will have taken place but place104, or in other words, you end with rightist relapse as the Hegelian Badiou of 1982 would have put it. At the same time, if one removes the event from its situation indexed to a sequence of preceding events (evental recurrence) then the speculative leftist deviation degenerates into proposing a primal event, a radical beginning, or an absolute commencement.105 The Two of the event the event and its site are both equally important to affirm or else begins the inevitable slide into static Manicheism. Affirming the two is a procedure of fidelity to the consequences of the event by securing its lasting impact through a disciplined labour of fidelity. Although the event is rooted in an ontological disjunction in structure, the emphasis nevertheless clearly lays expost on the side of the subject through the naming of the event and its declaration as part of the situation. Again, it might appear that with the entirely subjective procedure of faithful evental nomination the schema has settled into another comfortable binary: a taut mathematics of structure, versus a romantically inexplicable, subjectively induced belief system entirely disjoint from ontology. Yet this is far from the case, as the return to the ZF axiomatics most controversial supplement the axiom of choice will show. c. Intervention

The Idea of subjective intervention is inscribed in structure by the addition of the axiom of choice to ZF. A source of controversy for mathematicians in the early twentieth century, the axiom pertains to the application of functions within infinite sets. Given that from here on in the rest of Badious theory will be equally dependent upon the transfinite, a few preliminary words on the axiom of infinity are required. In the previous chapter (2.4) we already discussed Cantors derivation of the transfinite and his continuum hypothesis. For Badiou the decision to affirm the transfinite which the axiom of infinity combined with the power-set necessitates is crucial for the mathematics (axiom of choice, forcing) he will draw upon to prove the possibility of subjective intervention. It is a pivotal axiomatic for the inscription of subjective decision within set theoretic ontology. But why accept infinity? The actual infinites existence remains an open question, dividing mathematicians, physicists and philosophers alike.106 Philosophical speculation, scientific process, or mathematical foundationalism cannot adequately legislate upon the question. The lack of criteria for making a decision on the actual infinite is thus central for placing a decisionistic theory of the subject at the heart of Badious metaphysics.107 Additionally, in a supplementary argument against finitary or denumerable, transfinite mathematical paradigms beyond simply the circularity of making an affirmative decision on infinity that will allow an ontology of decision to be developed Badiou rejects intuitionism108 and contrasts the richness of the mathematical domain permitted by properly transfinite set theory against their barren, denumerable twin towns.109 He also cites the general acceptance of infinite sets by mathematicians as necessary for their practice drawing upon something like an intra-mathematical pragmatism akin to Quines indispensability argument for mathematics within the philosophy of science.110 In any case, the wager on the infinite is cast by ZFs axioms and Badiou keenly follows. Infinite sets demand an axiom of choice. This is because in finite sets finding a representative element of all a sets multiples poses few problems, because there is a minimal

(non void) element to perform the role. The function of choice needs no axiomatic legitimation owing to the fact that the element can be procedurally derived. In an infinite set, on the other hand, defining a function faces the problem that a single element has to represent an infinite number of elements: an operation with no definable rules given the excess of the immeasurable infinite over the finite, with no halting point of minimality other than the universal inclusion of the void.111 It follows that the axiom of choice is required to permit the arbitrary assignment of a representative element within an infinite set. For mathematicians, the axiom maintains the existence of a selection set on the force of assertion. None of this should be taken to imply that the axiom of choice should just be considered like any other ZF axiom however. The fact that after being included within the ZF axioms set theory is abbreviated as ZFC (or ZF-C) is sufficient to demonstrate the supplementary character of choice. The axioms difference lies in that if supposing the existence of a set, the function (the set of choice) has no explicit link to it: the functions existence is not prescribed by the set, its uniqueness to perform the function is not assured, and it is impossible to know which element the representative set is supposed to be representing. Mapping this within Badious philosophical interpretation, insofar as the choice permitted by the axiom is subtracted from the count (that is, the operation of choosing cannot be presented in the language of set theory) it is an Idea which is fundamentally different from all those in which we have recognized the laws of presentation, and thus within ontology, the axiom of choice formalizes the predicates of intervention. It is a question of thinking intervention in its being; that is, without the event. 112 Or put differently, its unpresentable operation (only the result is presented) affirms the ontological existence of the subjective form of intervention also carried across in the non-ontological idea of an event. By splitting early twentieth mathematicians apart in a similar way to Cantors transfinite, Zermelos axiomatic intervention was in essence a political conflict, because its stakes were

those of admitting a being of intervention; something that no known procedure or intuition justified.113 It was an event within the situation of ontology but note, only for the situation of ontology, for in all other situations events are non-ontological. The philosophical denouement is that since the axiom of choice is only of relevance with regard to infinite sets, and only in an infinite situation is the form of intervention possible, Badiou is obliged to make a fundamental ontological decision that in the last resort, every situation is infinite.114 Henceforth, all truths are infinite. At this point (Part VIII, Meditations 31 onwards) a disjunction in the books approach occurs which is crucial to flag up for our argument regarding the relationship of philosophical metaontology to non-ontological historical situations, ergo to the question of the intellectual authority of the philosopher viz. political truth procedures. So it is worth recapitulating some of the above points. That ontology is a situation means it presents presentation; it is the study of the void based underbelly of presentation only possible from the vantage point of mathematics. Both ontological and non-ontological situations are founded by the ZF set theory axioms: a universe of transfinite immeasurability. In ontological situations ontology can view its situation from the outside; in non-ontological situations this is impossible. Hence, although the ontologist can see the incompleteness of presentation and the omnipresent possibility for change, for an inhabitant of a non-ontological situation (and we can also include the metaphor of real world politics under this designation) a supernumerary event taking place at an evental site is needed in order for it to be named as part of a situation by a subject. An event happens when a multiple included, but not belonging within a situation presents itself, creating an evental site on the edge of the void.

The event is necessary for change for an inhabitant of a non-ontological, historical situation inside the ZFC universe because of the ontological/non-ontological distinction prohibiting an inhabitant from intuiting what could be changed in lieu of an event.

I stress these points again, for they demonstrate how subtly interwoven the idea of the event is with the ontological/non-ontological distinction (hence, also, the philosopher/subject-to-truth distinction). The event is the cornerstone idea preventing the collapse of the two situations into one another, therewith preserving the creative, truth bearing role for non-philosophical subjects. The event is what makes philosophy ultimately subservient to non-philosophical truths, but it is also what allows philosophy to think the procedures of an event and subjective affirmation without creating truths itself. Positing events circumscribe the philosopher to the level of abstract thought about processes of change. The above points are necessary in order to appreciate the discrepancy between Badious theory of the event in the middling meditations of the book in contrast with how Badiou completes the arc of the text with his theory of subjective intervention within a situation that creates (by forcing) a generic extension of it. Because when proving via Cohen the possibility of subjective decision to remake the situation within a transitive model of set theory in the later meditations he undermines the structural basis of the evental site (excess of inclusion over belonging) for an inhabitant of the situation. This leaves, I will argue, only the ontologist Subject to suppose an event for the inhabitant from the outside that is, to provide the impetus for the inhabitant subject to force change. Cognizance of this point requires us to continue to follow Badious text by passing through both the constructible universe of set theory and how, from within a similarly delimited model, Paul Cohens method of forcing generic extensions completes Badious theory of the subject.

Gdels proof of the consistency of a constructible inner model of set theory within ZF established the legitimacy of a model in which Cantors continuum hypothesis could be proven. The constructible model is created through an iterative process wherein only the parts of a set which can be assigned properties through formulas are permitted: no indeterminate or unnameable parts are allowed entry. The process of hierarchically ascending up levels of construction in a denumerable ordinal index retains only those parts which formulas can assign properties to. Consequently, there is a provable equivalence between the class of constructible sets (L) and the universal class (V), or V=L. 115 Within this model of ZF its quasi-completeness quasi, because Gdels incompleteness theorem establishes the impossibility of the completion of a denumerable model means that it is impossible to demonstrate that any sets are not constructible. The immeasurability of cardinality in a nonconstructed universe is reduced to an ordered succession of constructible cardinals leaping over the non-constructible, immeasurable sets effaced by the delimitations of the constructible universe. Therefore, in the constructible model the axiom of choice is provable, but also curtailed to the level of a theorem constructible from the other axioms, since the excessive cardinality demanding axiomatic prescription of a choice function for infinite sets is rendered unnecessary by the ordered hierarchy of cardinal construction. In Badious estimation this is a flattened and correct universe in which excess is reduced to the strictest of measures, and in which situations persevere indefinitely in their regulated being.116 It is also a universe prohibiting both the structural possibility of an evental site and the interventional form of a subjects nomination of an event (since the operation of the axiom of choice is unnecessary). But it is precisely from within Cohens similarly transitive, denumerable universe (the ground model) that Badiou will seek to prove the possibility of forcing truths through subjective intervention. The move into such a restricted model will spectacularly demonstrate the possibility of intervention under conditions of vacuum sealed rigidity where the

numeration does not exceed

. Yet, as we will see, this coup de grace to structural

determinism comes as the price of foreclosing the evental sites necessary to maintain the demarcation between philosophers and truth bearing subjects. Positioned at the end of Being and Event Paul Cohens method of forcing provides a distillation of Badious entire ontological project, for which it could be argued the preceding Meditations serve as a mere propaedeutic. Understanding Cohens already highly complex mathematical demonstration is, however, further exacerbated by its inscription within the philosophical vocabulary developed in Being and Event, resulting in most readers receiving these Meditations somewhat uncritically. Again, it seems to further confirm the generally neglectful attitude to Badious theory of the subject that nowhere in the literature has anyone questioned exactly why Badiou chooses to follow Cohens demonstration of forcing when more intuitive variations have subsequently been developed. Although former Althusserian, Jean-Touissant Desanati, teases the reader with a promise to ask how is it that Badiou seems to have no other option other than to accept completely the procedure of forcing, and more specifically, the version of it put forward by Cohen himself?117 he frustratingly neglects to answer his own question. Another motivation for questioning why Badiou makes use of Cohens approach, when he would almost certainly have been familiar with the more intuitive approaches developed subsequently, is provided by a problem confronting readers seeking secondary literature on forcing: the use of the Boolean valued model variant by the few existing beginners guides.118 This procedure differs from Cohens in that it creates a Boolean algebraic model within the standard model M of ZF, and then uses an ultra-filter mapping to verify or disprove independence results. Curiously, and for reasons unknown, Badiou describes the Boolean approach as a realist interpretation of forcing this despite the fact that the development of syntactic and Boolean approaches arguably contributed to Cohens own decision in favour of a formalist philosophy of mathematics. Kanamori, for one,

suggests that there is a quiet resonance here between Cohens coming down on the Formalist side and his syntactic approach to formal relative consistency.119 My own suspicion here is that Badiou sticks with Cohens original model-theoretical, semantic approach because it maintains a more clearly demarked sense of the internal/external, and hence something more like the ontological/non-ontological philosophical distinction upheld throughout Being and Event. But to understand the aforesaid decisions involvement in the suppression of the evental site in Cohens ground model, requires us to wade into the technicalities of forcing. From the perspective of Badious philosophical metaontology, the final section of B&E concerned with forcing is boundaried to the ontological situation. Problematically, however, although these meditations are restricted in this way, something very much like the ontological/historical situation distinction is revived through an implicit demarcation between the ontologist outside the model and the inhabitant internal to the model. Nowhere, it must be said, is this stated explicitly, but when Tho posed this point to Badiou in an interview you seem to treat non-ontological situations as if they can legitimately be understood as models of the ontological situation (for instance, in order for Cohens methods to be of any use in understanding truth procedures, our situation must be understood as being analogous to a denumerable, transitive model120 the reply certainly said nothing to correct the impression. Now, even though this flatly contradicts the distinction between nature as transitive and historical situations as non-transitive in the earlier mediations of B&E, it would seem safe to assume that the non-ontological, historical situation is transposed internally to Cohens model in the later meditations. Therefore the event, since it is prohibited by ontology by the axiom of foundation (which Badiou mentions) and impossible within a transitive model (which he does not), receives a surrogate in the meditations on Cohen in the form of the symbol to denote the generic, indiscernible set which will be forcibly constructed (in the mathematical literature: G). The indiscernable in any situation transcribes the idea of the event

from non-ontological situations to ontology; it is an event-without-event.121 But notwithstanding the way this generic set will be constructed retroactively, thereby matching the affirmational procedure of an event, the insinuated symmetry between the two notions lacks its most crucial component. Only the affirmational part of an event is reflected in the indiscernible, because in the transitive ground model the excess of inclusion over belonging necessary for an evental site is prohibited. Badiou himself draws attention to the fact that the power-set axiom is not absolute within the model. Pay close attention to the way the axiom is seen according to position external or internal to the model: from the outside, the ontologist can quite clearly distinguish a part of a which, not existing in S [the situation] (because it does not belong to S), makes up part of p(a) [the powerset of a] in the sense of general ontology without making up part of p(a) in the sense given to it by an inhabitant of S.122 Or to put it another way, the inhabitant of the model insofar as we assume this situation would be a nonontological, historical situation for him or her could never witness a rupture of undecideable excess; only the ontologist (or philosopher metaontologist) can see its potential from a position of exteriority to the model. Here, I argue, lies the elision between the ontological and non-ontological levels prepared by the suppression of cardinal immeasurability in Cohens ground model prior to a forcing procedure a hiccup in the reasoning of B&E which is all the more perplexing considering the rapid development of alternative techniques permitting forcing in a non-denumerable universe where V L by Cohen, Robert Soloway and others in the years following Cohens first results. In Cohens semantic ground model, however, where V L only after a forcing procedure, from the ontological outside the event is impossible because of its relation of self-belonging, but from the non-ontological inside the event is equally impossible because of the transitivity preventing an evental site from forming. This will have consequences for how we think the extra-philosophical autonomy of the subject in the four truth procedures, and particularly in politics. In this regard it is worth

noting that Badiou particularly emphasises the way forcing procedures reflect political procedures.

Ontology will explore how, from a given situation, one can construct another situation by means of the addition of an indiscernable multiple of the initial situation. This formalization is clearly that of politics, which, naming an unpresented of the site on the basis of the event, reworks the situation through its tenacious fidelity to that nomination. But here is a case of politics without future anterior, a being of politics.123

We return to this point shortly. But first some technical exegesis is required to give a brief explanation of forcing. For simplification, we work primarily from Cohens presentation and his use of terminology. As a point of entry, in his book Cohen insightfully contrasts forcing with the standard mathematical notion of implication. Whereas implication demands that any single statement implies another to be true (e.g., a P, or, if a then P), forcing differs from this classical logic in that when constructing a generic set consistent with the infinity of sets within a model, one needs to construct statements (A) which can be decided true or false for this generic set. Because statements about the generic set cannot contradict the semantics of the ground model, this means that by compiling consistent statements about the supposed set it is possible to create a finite set of such statements (P), or what Cohen calls a forcing condition. Thus, a finite procedure of compiling compatible statements regarding the as-yet-unknown generic set permits this sets compatibility with the model. Forcing therefore differs from implication owing to the fact that not just any set a satisfying the set of statements P will also satisfy the requirement of P to impute truth or falsity to a statement A about a. Only a generic

set a will fulfil this demand. The difference between implication and forcing rests entirely on the procedures necessity to operate only on generic sets. Generic sets are thus the lynchpin of the whole procedure. The aim of constructing them is to show how by only using sets already present within the model, one can still construct an extension of the model which forces certain statements to be true or false (this was Cohens aim when creating forcing, to show how an extension of the model can be created which refutes the continuum hypothesis henceforth CH). In Cohens words, the chief point is that we do not wish a to contain special information about M, which can only be seen from the outside, such as the countability of , and will imply that the model

containing a must contain more ordinals than those in M.124 [my emphasis] The point is instead to derive information out of M from the inside, by creating an extension of the model (N) containing the generic set, yet preserving the consistency of all the existing axioms and theorems of the initial model. The stipulation against measuring the highest ordinal is

required because simply adding ordinals to the model from the outside (as measuring the highest ordinal necessitates) would result in a collapse of the model. No gain would therefore be made viz. Gdels proof of the consistency of the CH in a transitive, denumerable model where V=L, because Cohens new model arising from forcing, aiming to prove VL (hence refuting CH), would not be a model at all if ordinals were simply added at will without passing through the generic procedure of ensuring their consistency with the constructive, ground model. Near the end of his Appendix entry on forcing, Peter Hallward describes the approach as drawing out the tacitly included non-constructible sets in M to force their belonging in N.125 The point is to seed the ground model with a non-constuctible generic set containing the requisite information to create a one-to-one correspondence between the ordinals and the desired cardinality of the continuum. It follows that what is required is a process, which by using no more than the internal possibilities of the ground model, one can

prove the falsity of the CH by adding generic integers, ergo demonstrating that CH cannot be proved one way or the other within ZF set theory i.e. the hypothesis is independent. In Kanamoris judgement Cohens constructions obtained their crucial operational clarity with this requirement in mind: to start with a (transitive) standard model of ZF and extend it without altering the ordinals.126 Or in Cohens own reflections on the subject: Just as Gdel did not remove any ordinals from the constructible universe, a kind of converse decision is made not to add any ordinals.127 The generic set is so important for this task because it is constructed out of the fixation of sequences of compatible conditions permitting veridical statements consistent with everything else in the model. If an infinite number of generic integers can be paired with the natural numbers by these forcing conditions then CH is refuted. Because choice between these conditions lies at the heart of the forcing procedure, in applying the method one is only ever reading off a limited, finite part of the generic set; thus the set itself cannot be represented as a theorem, which is necessarily finite in length. However, given that the ordinal index is denumerable we can nonetheless still be sure that a complete set exists. Cohen recalls his concerns prior to fully fleshing out the technique that It seemed too much to ask to hope that a finite number of conditions might be enough to decide everything.128 And in Badious metaontological interpretation, the significance of forcing runs along similar lines when he adduces from Cohens discovery that the infinity of truths is mediated by the finite procedures of a subject. To cover much of the same ground again but this time including more of the methods technical nuances, forcing involves a retroactive approach beginning with a supposed extended model N to ascertain all possible statements about N and deciding whether they are to be true or false. To this end labels are assigned to all the elements of N with the aim to complete an enumeration of all possible formulas by creating a function label space which can put the

into one-to-one correspondence with the set of all such formulas. The

procedure of transfinite induction permits the label space formulas in which every quantifier (e.g. or

to be defined as the set of all

) has a rank in the ordinal index. The ranking

process is necessary for establishing the ordering of statements so that the construction of a finite set of such statements (a forcing condition: P) can proceed in a way so to discern the enrichment and sequential compatibility of statements. In Badious express emphasis: the concept of order is central here, because it permits us to distinguish multiples which are richer in sense than others; even if, in terms of belonging, they are all elements of the supposed indiscernible, [the generic set: G].129 For the purposes of refuting CH, order is established by assigning a rank to each statement A composed of (,i,r): being the least ordinal, r the number of symbols in A, and i is either 1 or 0 depending upon whether is a successor ordinal. Thus, the rank of any statement can be written in suchlike form: (+1,1,3). As a point of clarification between forcing in general, and the form of forcing used by Cohen in his independence proofs, it is worth noting that many such ranking systems could be used depending on the purposes to which forcing is undertaken. Ordering is critical for forcing, but the form of the ordering is dependent on the purposes of the generic set being constructed. Here Cohens ordering process is engineered towards forcing a truth or falsity result for a oneto-one correspondence between and a cardinality of any size e.g. . To do this Cohen (often written

creates sets of ordered pairs that match the elements of the natural numbers

) with elements of the cardinality of the continuum desired in N. If they can be made to match by establishing a complete forcing condition the generic set in question, forging the extension of the model: N then CH is refuted by proving its independence from the axioms of ZF set theory. In terms of how ranking conditions serve the forcing procedure, Badiou provides an easily graspable example of the concept by way of a simplified scenario in which conditions are composed of only finite sequences of 0s and 1s. As the conditions are enriched their compatibility is assured by their accumulation. So condition 1 (o,1,0) is

enriched by a further condition 2 (o,1,0,0) without contradiction, since C2 contains C1. The centrality of order also pertains directly to the definition of forcing given that a forcing condition is the set of compatible statements. A statement becomes a condition as it is enriched by other compatible statements, with the effect that they force the lower-ranked statement. The crux of the matter requires a suspension of the implication P A because of the possibility that a stronger condition Q might force the opposite, i.e. the negation of a statement rather than its verification. P condition Q forces the negation of A (Q A therefore means P forces A unless a stronger ~A). Yet the permanent suspension of forcing

implication is prevented once, by transfinite induction, a complete sequence of forcing conditions Pn has been established, which is possible in a denumerable model. In this case, where Pn Pn+1 for all n and A, Pn either forces A or forces its negation. Pn is the resulting set

on which the extension of M is based and a model for ZF set theory fully consistent with the initial model. So although the set of all P is a set in the original model M, the complete sequence Pn accounts for the novelty of the new, extended model. N is formed out of an ordered, compatible sequence of forcing conditions, of which all its elements are already contained in M. Once a complete sequence of forcing conditions Pn has been established, N is established an extension of M and a model for ZF set theory fully consistent with the model it was derived from. So although the set of all P is a set in the original model M, the complete sequence Pn forms the new, extended model. N is formed out of an ordered, compatible sequence of forcing conditions, of which all its elements are already contained in M.

Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 63.

Amongst the multiplicity of philosophical reference points one finds in Badious later work, Althussers name can also be found bookending the beginning and end of his recent sequel to Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, where Badiou acknowledges him as an important influence, repeating the generous remarks of Metapolitics.

Alain Badiou and Tzuchien Tho, Interview with Alain Badiou In: Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. and eds. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2007), 80.
4

Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1997])
5

Johnston, Badiou, Zizek and Political Transformations, 15. Daniel Bensaid,

Alain Badiou cited in Bruno Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject: Part I. The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?, Pli 12 (2001), 200-229 (213).
8

Bruno Bosteels affirms that is indispensible to traverse the very problematic nature of the difference between science and ideology if we want to understand not only Althussers enterprise but also the systematic foundation of Badious philosophy. Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject: Part I, 207.
9

Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, eds. and trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2007),
10

Althusser, From Capital to Marxs Philosophy, fn. [page?]. Badiou, The Concept of Model, 9. Badiou, The Concept of Model, 12. Badiou, The Concept of Model, 13. Badiou, The Concept of Model, 17.

11

12

13

14

15

For an accessible introduction to model theory see Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gdel's Proof (New York: NYU Press, 2001).
16

Badiou, The Concept of Model, 48. Brassier (2005, p. 143) ibid Badiou, The Concept of Model, 54. Badiou, The Concept of Model, 53. Louis Althusser Foreward In: Badiou, The Concept of Model, 3.

17

18

19

20

21

22

For the most gregarious example of this evaluation of 68 see Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010)
23

See Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans. (London and New York: Verso, 20xx). Richard Wolin also cites this example in the Introduction to Winds from the East.
24

For example, one can see in the Laurie Penny-Alex Callinicos tiff over the 2010 student protests as a rerun of 68 schisms. See
25

Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, 193. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 11, 10. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 39. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 23. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 52, 53. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 72. Rancire, Althussers Lesson, 122-123. Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, 315. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, 135. Alain Badiou, Roads to Renegacy, New Left Review 53, Sept/Oct 2008, p. 126 Ibid., pp. 132-133

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Les Maoists et Leir Histoire: Histoire de l'U.C.F.M.L: quelques points de repre, Le Marxiste-Leniniste, No. 50-51 (1981). Available online: http://www.infosedipro.org/Dochml/presse/sommaires/lemarxisteleniniste/ml50-51/p2a6.htm [Accessed 20 July 2011]
37

Alain Badiou cited in Peter Hallward, Alain Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 33. Luke Zachary Fraser also writes These events [of 68] can accurately be said to mark the end of Badious Althusserian period. Introduction In: Badiou, The Concept of Model, xv.
38

Alain Badiou, The Lessons of Jacques Rancire: Knowledge and Power after the Storm In: Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. G. Rockhill and P. Watts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 30-54 (31).
39

Badiou, The Lessons of Jacques Rancire, 50.

40

See Mao Zedong, On Practice and Contradiction, introduced by Slavoj Zizek (London and New York: Verso, 2008)
41

Commenting on the actuality of Chinese Maoism, that is, beyond its theoretical interest and deployment within the subjective sequence of 1968 in France, Badiou claims to find in Maoist China the culmination of a 20th century revolutionary sequence tied to the party-state nexus: the Maoist current, [is] the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies, because the Cultural Revolution is the last significant sequence that is still internal to the party-state. More wistifully, in the final accounting the strategic meaning (or the universal range) of these inventions was a negative one. Because what they themselves carried forth, and what they vitally impressed on the militant minds of the entire world, was nothing but the end of the party-state as the central production of revolutionary political activity. (Alain Badiou, The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?, 481-482, 488).
42

Alain Badiou, Theory of Contradiction, excerpts translated by Alberto Toscano. Available at: http://versuslaboratory.janvaneyck.nl/app/webroot/uploads/badiou%20theory%20of%20ccont .pdf [Accessed 19 July 2011]
43

Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York, Continuum, 2009), 37.
44

Bruno Bosteels, Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics, 600. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 15. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 71.

45

46

47

Bruno Bosteels, Translators Introduction In: Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York, Continuum, 2009), xxi.
48

Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 4. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 44. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 7. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 11. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 39. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 49. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 63, 62. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 60. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 62.

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 59. Badiou (2009b, p. 190) ibid, p. 188 Salankis (2001, p. 5) Badiou (2009b, pp. 192-193). Ibid, p. 193. Ibid, p. 197. Ibid, p. 217 Badiou (2009b, p. 210)

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

.
65 66

For more on Badious considerations of the conditions effected philosophy see Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. 67 Bruno Bosteels, Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics, 581
68

Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 3.
69

Badiou, Being and Event, 6, 3.

70

Indeed, in an endnote to the work Badiou writes that of the great Bachelardian tradition, fortunately my master G. Canguihem survives.Badiou, Being and Event, 483, en. to pg. 15.
71

Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Mathematical Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: New York State University Press, 2006 [1998]), 60.
72

Badiou, Briefings on Existence, 61. Badiou, Briefings on Existence, x. Badiou, Being and Event, 15.

73

74

75

In Brassier's judgement the veritable worth of Badious work lies not in his theory of the event but rather in the subtractive ontology which was merely intended as its propaedeutic. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), Chapter 4.
76

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism In: Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Continuum), 51.
77

Badiou, Being and Event, 13.

78

Badiou, Being and Event, 8. Badiou, Being and Event, 483, en. to pg. 12 and 13.

79

80

Fernando Zamalea, Albert Lautman and the Creative Dialectic of Modern Mathematics In: Albert Lautman, Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, trans. Simon Duffy (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), xxxii.
81

Lautman, Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, 29.

82

Alain Badiou and Tzuchien Tho, Interview with Alain Badiou In: Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. and eds. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2007), 82.
83

Lautman, Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, 204. Badiou, Being and Event, 8. Badiou, Briefings on Existence, 48-49. Badiou and Tho, Interview, 93. Badiou, Being and Event, 11.

84

85

86

87

88

Paul Cohen cited in Akihiro Kanamori, Cohen and Set Theory, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Sept 2008), p. 360.
89

Paul Cohen, The Discovery of Forcing, Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 32, No. 4, (Winter 2002), 1080.
90

The impetus should be understood as something of a continuation of Jean-Paul Sartres project of establishing the subjective conditions of freedom. Just as for Sartre the infinite extensionality of consciousness delivers the conditions for human freedom, so for Badiou the existence of undecideable propositions provides an ontological inconsistency which a subject can act upon the key undecideable being Cantors affirmation of the existence of actual infinity in mathematics. For an excellent exposition of the theoretical proximity of Jean-Paul Sartres extensional theory of consciousness and the set theory used by Badiou see Luke Zachary Fraser, The Infinite, (unpublished Masters thesis).
91

Badiou, Briefings on Existence, x. Badiou, Being and Event, 42-44. Badiou, Being and Event, 53. Badiou, Being and Event, 57. Badiou, Being and Event, 84.

92

93

94

95

96

Slavoj iek, The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2004) argues that there seems to be a Kantian division between phenomena and noumena in Badious philosophy.
97

Badiou, Being and Event, 87.

98

In a personal discussion with one of the most astute readers of the use of mathematics in Badious philosophy, Luke Zachary Fraser agreed with my estimation of the arbitrariness of this assumption, and he also questioned the insight gained by equating nature with ordinals.
99

Badiou, Being and Event, 131. Badiou, Being and Event, 140. Badiou, Being and Event, 202. Badiou, Being and Event, 178. Badiou, Being and Event, 179 Badiou, Being and Event, 205. Badiou, Being and Event, 210.

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

Since Anaximanders idea of apeiron as the infinitely divisible substance of the world, the infinite has been a limit concept in many systems of thought. As Graham and Kantor elucidate in their recent book, Naming Infinity (2009), for mystics and the religious the infinite has often played the role of sublating the rational within the spiritualproviding something like a rational concept which cannot be grasped by the rational mind itself. In science, whereas at the same time as the infinite universe has generally been thought to have been discredited through deep cosmological observations, the postulate of the multiverse reestablishes its possibility; or conversely, no sooner does the infinite appear in experimental quantum data than the imperative to reconsider the theory arisesas demonstrated by Lee Smolins (1998) break from string theory. And finally, in mathematics, Georg Cantors infinite totalities and the transfinite continuum proves divisive to today, with mathematicians divided between finitary and infinite paradigms (see Bremer, 2007).
107

For Badiou, Cantors epochal significance lies above all else in his decision to conceive the infinite as an actual totality, and the productive, yet groundless, consequences for mathematics this decision initiated. The Cantor event, and its consequent sequence through Zermelo-Fraenkel, Gdel and Cohen, is used by Badiou to demonstrate the existence of absolutely undecidable propositions resisting all proof and necessitating the procedure of an evental nomination (2008, p. 101)a subjective, and subjectifying, intervention on the part of the human.
108

The influential intuitionist school of thought (inaugurated by Brouwer and developed by Heyting and Dummett), that all mathematics is constructed from finitary procedures constituting proof, results in a humanistic conception of mathematics whereby there are no non-experienced truths (Brouwer (1983, p. 90)) and mathematics, from the intuitionistic

point of view, is a study of certain functions of the human mind. (Heyting (1983, p. 73) Which is to say, in its extreme incarnation, for intuitionists the truth of a mathematical statement is affirmed in the act of using mathematics, and in the shared experience of a demonstration amongst a community of scholars. At the same time, Brouwers intuitionist grounding of mathematics, resting as it does on a form of Kantian a priori, has no problem with the actual infinite on the basis of its understanding of mathematics as an independent, empirically empty, process of its own.108 Brouwers divergence with Cantor and hence its incompatibility with the entire edifice of Being and Event is based upon an intramathematical dispute over the nature of the continuum. Intuitionism can accept the first infinite cardinal, w, because its elements are denumerable, but rejects the second, greater infinite cardinal, ,1because of its indenumerability. Brouwer happily accepts Cantors diagonal argument as a proof that the real unit interval is uncountable. But he does not conclude that there exists an uncountable cardinal number. For, there is no construction there. (ibid, p. 334) For Brouwer, as opposed to Cantor, then, the infinite cannot be extended along a transfinite scale. Badiou negates this conception: intuitionism has mistaken the route in trying to apply back onto ontology criteria of connection which come from elsewhere, and especially from a doctrine of mentally effective operations. In particular, intuitionism is a prisoner of the empiricist and illusory representation of mathematical objects.108 Other objections have been forwarded by formalists who seek to square the infinite in mathematics within the apparent absence of its existence in the empirical world. As Hilbert puts it: we could even interpret the tendency of modern science as emancipation from the infinitely small and we must consider the expanse of the universe to determine whether it embraces anything infinitely large. But here again modern science, in particular astronomy, has reopened the question and is endeavouring to solve it serious objections against infinity have been found. (Hilbert (1983, p. 185-186)) Hilbert observes that where physics has explored the realm of the infinitely small it has found an atomic basis, and where it has probed the infinitely largethe largest conceivable thing being our entire Universeit has found it to be finite. In both cases physics empirically affirms the absence of the actual infinite, previously indicated by the philosophical paradoxes that rendered unlikely its existence (at least in its instantiation in the present). Insofar as more recent theories of the multiverse might be seen to undermine the finitude of the universe, their speculative, and perhaps even inaccessible, nature must mean that they remain more within the Aristotelian category of the potential than the actualeven if Aristotle reserved his category for temporality.
109

Badiou makes this argument with reference to the constructible universe of set theory in which the cardinals (powers of infinity) succeed one another like ordinals and thus banish the excess of immeasurable transfinite cardinality from set theory: the constructive universe appears to be one of astonishing poverty, in that it reduces the function of excess to nothing, and only manages to stage it by means of fictive cardinals. Being and Event, 314.
110

Quines indispensability argument can be put as follows: the present indispensability of mathematics in natural science requires acknowledgement that is possesses a truth exceeding its portrayal as a system of syntactic tautologies. See Quine (1969; 1983). Badiou is a long way from such concerns, it must be admitted, but there are similarities in his estimation of mathematicians as working ontologists, and the entailing commitment that what mathematicians use in their practice is of ontological worth should count is a certain kind of indispensability argument. For example, he makes this argument with regards to the axiom of choice. See Being and Event, 225.

111

For an accessible presentation of the problem of the minimality of shared elements in an infinite set see Michael D. Potter, Set theory and its philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Chapter 14, 238-260.
112

Badiou, Being and Event, 227,226,227. Badiou, Being and Event, 228. Badiou, Being and Event, 235.

113

114

115

See Paul Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York: Dover Publications, 2008), 88.
116

Badiou, Being and Event, 304.

117

Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou In: Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum), 63.
118

See Timothy Y. Chow, A beginners guide to forcing. Available at: http://wwwmath.mit.edu/~tchow/forcing.pdf [Accessed 19 August 2011]
119

Akihiro Kanamori, Cohen and Set Theory, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Sept 2008), 369.
120

Tho and Badiou, Interview, 95. Badiou, Being and Event, 356. Badiou, Being and Event, 361. Badiou, Being and Event, 357-358. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, 111. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 347. Kanamori, Cohen and Set Theory, 360. Cohen, The Discovery of Forcing, 1091. Cohen, The Discovery of Forcing, 1093. Badiou, Being and Event, 362.

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129