Doubles or nothing : the problem of binding truth to being in the work of Alain Badiou
journal contribution
posted on 2005-01-01, 00:00authored byJ Clemens
In this article, I discuss how things go with the "Nothing" in the work of Alain Badiou, a topic which is evidently central to his thought, and which has received a great deal of attention in the commentary to date. As this problem is inaccessible outside of Badiou’s deployment of mathematics, I will suggest how accounts of Badiou’s work remain flawed insofar as they evade his mathematical demonstrations, and I attempt to clarify how mathematics operates in his system. I then examine the consequences that such a use of mathematics has for Badiou’s doctrine of the nothing. I conclude with a discussion of some of the difficulties that the nothing continues to pose to Badiou, which have not (yet) been satisfactorily resolved. These difficulties devolve from the problematic of the incessantly doubling void.
History
Journal
Filozofski vestnik
Volume
26
Issue
2
Pagination
97 - 111
Publisher
Zalozba Z R C
Location
Ljubljana, Slovenia
ISSN
0353-4510
Language
eng
Publication classification
C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal; C Journal article