When Alain Badiou’s monumental Being and Event appeared, it came as something of a shock to mainstream French philosophy, which had for decades been dominated by a radical poststructuralist skepticism and a related allergy to grand narratives of all sorts. Rebelling against these tendencies, Being and Event offered a rigorously rationalist philosophy in the old, grand style—an unabashed attempt at reviving discredited concepts such as universality, objectivity, truth, and the subject. In so doing, Badiou returned to an ancient philosophical puzzle concerning the relationship between “the one and the many,” or unity and multiplicity. His reflections on this problem led not only to an exploration of being as such, abstracted from being anything in particular, but to an account of being in all its historical specificity and concreteness. Being and Event then asks—against this ontological background; and with a view to science, politics, art, and love, as domains in which truth “happens”—how can we understand the existence of genuine novelty? How can we account for becoming and revolution, creation and change?
In this course, we’ll survey Badiou’s magnum opus, attempting to come to grips with this ambitious project through an exploration of its key concepts, such as presentation, representation, operation, situation, being qua being, and consistent and inconsistent multiplicities. What does Badiou mean when he says that “ontology is mathematics”? What role does set theory and axiomatic formalism play in this ontology? In particular, what is the significance of the null set, and of what Badiou calls “the void”? What does Badiou mean by the “event,” and how does it relate to the various “truth-procedures” of the natural and social worlds, of aesthetics and the personal? What is Badiou’s understanding of history and of the possibility of revolution?
