I’ve been reading Badiou’s Paul book because Keith and I are slated to read some Badiou together. I’ve read approximately 14/37ths of the book so far. I’ll finish soon. What follows are my notes. I’ll try to write something more focused ASAP. Keith’s reflection on this is more focused than mine.
Much here that reminds me of the bit on aleatory materialism over at the Archive. I think is because Badiou has an Althusserian past… I’ll have to remember to dig around a bit in his biography, I am a lover of trivia.
“Paul is a poet-thinker of the event, as well as one who practices and states the invariant traits of the what can be called the militant figure.” (2)
Part of Badiou’s motivation is because “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure - even if this takes the form of denying its possibility - called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been the party militant.” (2) — Party militant is over. Time for a new militant.
Paul/Christ::Lenin/Marx.
Badiou’s interest in Christianity is strictly metaphorical, not religious. (4-5) It’s a fable, “that part of a narrative that (…) fails to touch on any Real, unless it is by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary.” (4)
The question or goal for Paul “is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only “proof” lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.” (5)
Questions to keep in mind as I read:
1. For Badiou, must a subject be a) structured b)structured by a law c) devoid of all identity?
2. Subject is suspended to an event (a la Kierkegaard? teleological suspension of the ethical?), event’s only proof is declaration by a subject. Proof is epistemological/discursive. That which in knowledge/discourse attests to the event is the subjects declaration. The subject is ontological, or more precisely, the condition for epistemology/discourse. Is the subject’s “suspension-to” a relationship of causality/being-condition (ie, event makes subject such that event precedes subject logically/historically/both) or of action/orientation (subject exists in some way in relation to event but is either prior or logically/historically independent of event)?
“this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for the possibility of a universal teaching within history itself.” (5) I don’t know what this means. I suspect “universal teaching” here does not relate to Ranciere’s universal teaching, that the two are homophones, I think this is more like ‘universal lesson’. Another question: what does Badiou mean by universal?
“What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate, either by its cause or by its destination.” (5) Non-objectivity (yet universality) of truth? Is there an epistemological problem here (and if so, is it unique to this or a more widespread one)?
Badiou decries the ‘reduction’ of truth, rife in the present he claims, to mere judgments. (6)
Paul “is the one who, assigning to the universal a specific connection of law and the subject, asks himself with the most extreme rigor what the price is to be paid for this assignment, by the law as well as the subject. This interrogration is precisely our own,” Badiou notes, since his project is to wonder what if “we were able to refound the connection between truth and the subject, then what consequences must we have the strength to hold fast to, on the side of truth (evental and hazardous) as well as on the side of the subject (rare and heroic)?” (7)
Note the connection here between (Paul’s) law and (Badiou’s) truth. Is this analogical - in Paul’s writings law is parallel to truth in Badiou’s - or more than that?
Badiou is anti- identitarian and communitarian.
The $64,000 question: “What are the conditions for a universal singularity?” (13)
“Paul’s general procedure is the following: if there is an event, and truth consists in declaring it and then in being faithful to this declaration, two consequences ensue. First, since truth is evental, or of the order of what occurs, it is singular. It is neither structural, nor axiomatic, nor legal. No available generality can account for it, nor structure the subject who claims to follow in its wake. Consequently, there can not be a law of truth. Second, truth being inscribed on the basis of a declaration that is in essence subjective, no preconstituted subset can support it (…) It is offered to all, or addressed to everyone, without a condition of belonging being able to limit this offer, or this address.” (14)
This seems to break the link between truth and law. I wonder if perhaps the relationship is that law is founded by truth (rather than truth justified by law)? Truth, in turn, is declared by a subject who experiences (is created in?) an event. Part of the point seems to be a non-reducibility of truth. What’s with the universal address/offering bit? That seems daft, particularly in relation to politics. An address to the Bush administration? What would that mean? To be meaningfully considered an addressing there must be a chance of the addressee being able to receive the address. (I can not, for instance, address a corpse or a rock, except in a metaphorical sense: they are not included in the universality of those to whom my declaration is offered.) Perhaps this means there’s no admission price, no condition of belonging, but that also strikes me as daft (contra Agamben - the community without conditions of belonging must require the condition, minimally, of a lack of a paired genuine desire and genuine ability to impose additional conditions of belonging upon the community. This is precisely one of the weirdnesses involved in liberal democracy - believe in human rights or we’ll bomb you - and in the dictatorship of the proletariat).
However, the subject “does not pre-exist the event he (sic) declares”. And,
“[t]ruth is entirely subjective (it is of the order of a declaration that testifies to a conviction relative to the event). Thus, every subsumption of its becoming under a law will be argued against.” (Tarski again? Schnee ist weiss satisfies if snow is white - satisfaction is logically primitive, - truth is if it is declared by a subject in an event - genuine declaration of genuine event is primitive?) “Fidelity to the declaration is crucial, for truth is a process, not an illumination. In order to think it, one requires three concepts: one that names the subject at the point of declaration; one that names the subject at the point of his conviction’s militant address; lastly, one that names the subject according to the force of the displacement conferred upon him through the assumption of the truth procedure’s completed character.” (These names seem to refer to/be made use of in different temporal locations, different whens.) And a “truth is of itself indifferent to the state of the situation (…) it is subtracted from the organization of subsets prescribed by the state.” State means both condition (a la state of affairs) and political state (the State as collective capital, though I don’t know if Badiou would agree with that descriptor or not). Must it be subtracted? Why not added? I’m not invested in the terminologies either way here, but is subtraction the only description? What about “overlows”? What’s at stake in what set of terms vs another? (Are these just the terms Badiou’s using - I was raised into English, I’ve kept speaking English, I don’t have an ultimate argument for my continued use of English, I’m more concerned with what I can do with my English - or are these special terms, not just a special type of terms but themselves a set of special terms uniquely suited to some use - a la, I’m told, Heidegger’s remarks on Greek and/or German as specifically good philosophical languages? (14-15)
Paul is an antiphilosopher (17). Others in this camp for Badiou - Roussea, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.
“No discourse can lay claim to truth if it does not contain an explicit answer to the question: Who speaks?” (17.)
“Just as the Resurrection remains totally incalculable and it is from this that one must begin, Paul’s faith is that from which he begins as a subject, and nothing leads up to it. The event - “it happened,” purely and simply, in the anonymity of the road - is the subjective sign of the event proper that is the Resurrection of Christ.” (17.) So events link to or otherwise in some fashion relate to one another (event of Paul’s conversion, event of resurrection). This sounds like nonsense, or at best hyperbole. Nothing leads up to it? This sounds like Agamben as well, things seem to fall from the sky, to arise ex nihilo. Paul had to have been born to be converted. He had to have not been killed at some prior point. All of these elements have histories. These histories are themselves infinitely explicable (like all speech, in the sense that stopping is not necessarily a result of an internal logic to the argument/narrative but some external phenomena, like the death of the speaker). Of course, speech must, judged by other criteria, stop. When and why and how, and by what criteria, are other questions. There is an important point here, against the (Augustine, I think?) view that one should know how to swim before getting in the water… This comes down to an ethical imperative to act, and a psychological prop against being frightened to act. But actions and events do have enabling (and disabling) conditions. We may not need some level of knowledge thereof (partial - and how much, none, exhuastive?) in order to have an event, to act, and the demand for such knowledge can be pernicious and disruptive. That doesn’t mean such knowledge or the desire for it is always so, nor does it mean that events just happen. Politically this sounds like spontaneism, which is very dull. All of this, is however, well and good as a corrective to its (dialectical?) twin of objectivism, determinist materialism, also bureaucratic rationalism - everything can and should be fully known and prior to that nothing can or should be done. But that’s all, a corrective.
Paul turns “away from all authority other than that of the Voice that personally summoned him to his becoming-subject” (18). That sounds really great and all, anti-authoritarian and all that. But barring belief in actual divine voices, what to make of this as fable? Actual voices belong to people, whether an internal one or an external (perhaps internalized) one, which makes this a declaration of/toward another person, and so politically doesn’t get around a type of authoritarianism at all.
“Through their commensurability within a truth, anonymous individuals are always transformed into vectors of humanity as a whole.” (20.) ?? I see. Since truths are subjective, it strikes me that there might be competing truths, which relate to each other as incommensurable, as antagonists. If so, do both sides become vectors of humanity? Or is there some additional claims to be made such that subjects, in the context of declaring truths (the truth of event), do not and can not conflict?
“a truth procedure does not comprise degrees. Either one participates in it, declaring the founding event and drawing its consequences, or one remains foreign to it. This distinction, without intermediary or mediation, is entirely subjective. (…) A truth procedure is only universal insofar as it is supported, at that point where it indexes the real, by an immediate subjective recognition of its singularity.” (21-22.) What does it mean, “indexes the real”? Is this a Lacan thing? (Ugh.) And what is it to support a truth procedure? Actually, what’s a truth procedure? As I (mis)understand the use of terms here, event is declared (by a not-subject or proto-subject relative to the event, because events are generative of subjects rather than the reverse), and after initial declaration the event is related to via fidelity. (Another question - is fidelity to the initial event, the initial declaration, the event via the declaration?) Is that relationship of fidelity the truth procedure, or is the whole ensemble - event/declaration/fidelity - the truth procedure? The truth procedure needs an action by the subject - subjective recognition. Do truth procedures also produce subjects? (As events do?) ???
Badiou, big question: “Who is the subject of the truth procedure?” (23.) And what does it mean to be “of” something: product of, producer of, inhabitant of, neighbor of?
“it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives, but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever.” (30.) Sure. Great. But… which convictions? Conviction as such? (In which case this is something of a formalism. It might be that he tries to get around this by a view - implied or explicit - as to what constitutes a genuine conviction. But that doesn’t really answer anything, just displaces - implies an arbiter of real vs false convictions, for which an argument would have to be presented, unless it’s just a relativism/ethnocentrism in Rorty’s sense, which Badiou seems to be antithetical toward.)
Other question: the story sounds very isolated/individualized, Paul alone. One subject per event, one event per moment. In the stuff on the Jerusalem conflict, Peter’s conflict with Paul: did Peter also have an event (there was the compromise from which Paul emerged as prosletyzer to the gentiles/gentile christians and Peter to the jews/judeo-christians, could this have been an event for Peter as well, and if so could these events have conflicted with each other? Or if we take a scenario of combat between members of opposed forces in a war, can there be events that conflict - possibly events that map onto, incommensurably, the same occurence, say a mortar shelling or something?)
Paul’s is a work of rupture (31). This might be one answer to the multiple-events question I have, but why would it be necessary for only one rupture to occur at a given point in space/time, particularly given Badiou’s emphasis on subjectiveness?
Badiou accuses the gospel stories of charlatanry, but forgives Paul’s conversion story and the story of the death and resurrection that Paul tells from that same charge. (32-33.) Why? Ahh, “Paul’s epistles are the only truly doctrinal texts in the New Testament. (…) Without Paul’s texts, the Christian message would remain ambiguous, with little to distinguish it from the overabundant prophetic and apocalyptic literature of the time.” (33-34.) I don’t know what he means by doctrinal, but I think I get the point - Paul provides the novelty, the specialness. But he’s got a story that’s just as much a nut story as the rest, it’s just a difference of genre (ghost vs vampire stories).
“an organization puts together the compendium of its canonical texts when the time has come for it to secure its orientation against dangerous deviations, or struggles against threatening divisions.” (34.) Keep that in mind for when Badiou’s Organization Politique puts out a collection of its central documents. And, dangerous, or judged to be dangerous? Are all organization judgments of dangers of this kind correct? Or do leaderships sometimes use “danger to the organization” as a way to fight against threats to this leadership’s continuing position as leadership? If the latter sometimes happens (and Badiou’s a loon not to agree) then this is no praise for Paul.
In the discussion on Marcion and the suppression of his heresy (34-36), do Badiou’s “paulinism” vs “ultra-paulinism” map onto attacks against infantile left communists, the ‘ultra-leftists’? In this discussion Badiou notes that Marcion’s work did not survive, and in fact “Paul came to be known through this image of Paul that it was necessary to construct in opposition to those who, in accordance with an extremist vision of the Christian rupture, appropriated the founders most radical statements.” (36) Does this trouble Badiou much, that the Paul of the writings may be in part a product of an attempt to combat Marcion’s use of Paul? No, because “this does not exclude the possibility that, on behalf of the cause, and by doctoring the genuine texts and fabricating false ones, the apostle came to be more or less “rectified,” or his radicalism tempered”. (36.) Hmm.
Despite all this, in Paul’s work “under the imperative of the event, something solid and timeless, something that, precisely because it is a question of orienting a thought toward the universal in its suddenly emerging singularity, but independently of all anecdote, is intelligible to us without having to resort to cumbersome historical mediations” (36.) That’s convenient. I imagine he’d say the same of Lenin too?
“For Passolini, Paul, in revolutionary fashion, wanted to destroy a model of society based on social inequality, imperialism, and slavery. There resides in him the holy will to destruction.” (37.) That reminds me, I want to research Passolini’s slagging off of Fo and see if I can’t slag off Passolini.
For Badiou, Passolini’s take on Paul holds that “Paul is our contemporary because the sudden eruption of chance, the event, the pure encounter, are always at the origin of a saintliness. Moreover, today, the figure of the saint is necessary, even if the contents of the initiating encounter may vary.” And, our society is like Paul’s, just as corrupt and criminal, but even more “supple and resistant” than the Roman. And “Paul’s statements are endowed with a timeless legitimacy.” (37.) Metaphorically, though, right? For us. Not the genuine true believing death-and-resurrection-really-happened christian Paul, though, right?
“For Passolini, reflecting on communism through Paul, the Party is what, little by little, inverts saintliness into priesthood through the narrow requirements of militantism. How does genuine saintliness bear the ordeal of a History that is at once fleeting and monumental, one in which it constitutes an exception rather than an operation? It can only do so by hardening itself, by becoming authoritarian and organized. But that hardness, which is supposed to preserve it from all corruption by History, reveals itself to be an essential corruption, that of the saint by the priest. It is almost the necessary movement of an internal betrayal. And this internal betrayal is captured by an external betrayal, so that Paul will be denounced.” (38.) Paul wasn’t a priest, Badiou insists, but a saint. Am I reading in too much in hearing here a history of the Party? One that sucks, too. Ugh. I’ll have to move my ultraleftist reading list closer to the top of the infinite stack of books
“Paul’s project is to show that a universal logic of salvation cannot be reconciled with any law, be it one that ties thought to the cosmos, or one that fixes the effects of an exceptional election.” (42.) I suppose that answers my question re: Badiou’s truth and law. At the same time, in the margin my friend Colin’s written (I’m borrowing his copy, he’s dis/de-pressingly smarter than I am, as evidenced again by reading the notes he’s taken in the book) “but the ‘law of the heart’. Yes indeed. Paul obeys no authority but that of the voice he heard. But that’s still obedience. Is this still a lack of law? Or is it univeralizing of law, of law-making (in the I think Kantian sense of the I as self-legislating)?
Badiou continues, “It is impossible that the starting point be the Whole, but just as impossible that it be an exception to the Whole. (…) One must proceed from the event as such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing. But proceeding from the event delivers no law, no form of mastery, be it that of the wise man or the prophet.” (42.) So the Pauline militant organization is utterly free of mastery? (If so then anyone in one who found what they took to be mastery would just be quixotic then.) Bah. Also, the whole “not exceptional” thing doesn’t make sense to me. That which refuses integration can be rendered in another idiom as an exception. I’m fine with Badiou’s attachment to his idiom, but he doesn’t seem to like the idea that there are others, or to want any foregrounding of the fact that his idiom is an idiom. That makes it harder to assess its relative recommendability (based, of course, on my own criteria).
Note to self, break out the Tarski essay, see if that relates at all.
Hey Nate,
I haven’t read all of your post yet, I’ve got to get myself off the internet at the moment but I’ll be here in the morning to go through some of this. It looks good. Just to point out quickly something concerning the universality of a truth that remains non-objective: There is no epistemological problem here because for Badiou truth does not inhere in any proposition (though there are declarations), and truth as Badiou conceives it has nothing to do with epistemology. (I wish I could work out the implications of this for even myself at the moment, as Badiou points it out elswhere in his Ethics, but its going to have to wait). Even Zizek, like Badiou often does, will give the example of ‘the scene of the two’. It’s a ’subject-language’, and two people in love who know the truth of their situation might appear mad in the eyes of others, but they are militantly faithful to the completely subjective event that provoked a declaration of “I love you”. I’m not well versed in Lacanese or Hegelese, but I think you would find the sections on Badiou in Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject very helpful. For question no. 1, a, b, and c - though with some very ‘diagonal’ definitions of those conditions.
cheers,
Keith
Comment by Keith — January 12, 2006 @ 3:32 am
hi Keith,
Thanks for this. I’ll see if I can get that book out of the library. Don’t feel compelled to read all of this, by the way, I know it’s too long. It’s just my notes to self. When I finish the book and finish taking notes I plan to try to write something more condensed and clear, doing stuff like this post is just part of my process (especially because it’s not my copy of the book so I can’t write in it), I typed it because I type faster than I handwrite and I post it here on the blog mainly so I can have access to it from different locations (my computer situation is less than ideal and I sometimes work from different spots, I’m a semi-involuntary peripatetic) when I go back to write on this stuff.
As for the truth stuff, I’ll have to read and think more about this. I really don’t get it. I may have an overly narrow definition of truth - wait, no, that implies more clarity than I’ve actually got. I should say, I may have a more narrow range of situations in which I don’t balk at the word truth, but, to my mind it runs like this: Badiou says the truth is declared, it’s in/of the declaration. The event is not true (nor is it false), the event happens. The declaration of the event is where truth comes in. If that’s not a misread, then truth is part of the discursive register. Fine and good. To say it’s not epistemological, though, such that there’s not criteria for telling truth from not-truth, strikes me as really weird. It’s been a long time since I read Kierkegaard, but your remark on a couple in love reminds me of Kierkegaard on Abraham (can’t even remember offhand what book that’s in). Abraham may look crazy to the outsider (he does!), but he’s militantly faithful. However, to my mind it simply is the case that either Abraham heard a voice or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then it’s not truth and militant faith, but deception. If he did, that voice was either the voice of god or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t then it’s not truth and militant faith, but something else - a cruel trick played by a neighbor, a hallucination, whatever. I’m fine if it turns that for Badiou none of this enters into something’s being truth, but then it strikes me that his use of the word is more like a homophone compared with a lot of other uses of the word such that I’m not sure why he retains (or why I, reading Badiou, should follow him in) the use of the word instead of some other new term.
Like I sad, the truth not being to do with propositions, I don’t know what to do with that. It makes me think about performatives… someone, Austin I think but I can’t recall offhand, has a relatively funny essay on performatives. He takes the example of christening. If at a christening ceremony for a ship someone rushes out of the crowd, wrests away the champagne bottle, smashs it on the ship and shouts “I christen you the Generalissimo Stalin!”, that’s not a christening. It’s not the case that the statement is false, exactly, it’s that the performative misfires. Just as in saying “I promise you I’ll read the Paul book by the end of 2006,” it doesn’t seem to me to make much sense to say that’s true or false anymore than it does for any other action like cooking or doing laundry. One might say “it is true that I promise” just like “it is true that I fix you a sandwich”, and one might abbreviate that as saying the “it’s true, he promises/fixes a sandwich”, but I don’t think that should be understood such that there’s a truth to the action. Certainly not of the same kind of truth as in other instances of the use of the word.
At the end of the day, I’m not super invested in the terms here. This may be all obvious and I’m just importing a sense of truth that doesn’t really apply to the one Badiou has. If that’s so then I’m the one making the misapplication, but I still don’t know what B means by truth…
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 12, 2006 @ 4:48 pm
Hey Nate -
You have definitely raised some very interesting questions here and I’m not sure where to start. You take a lot more notes than I do, even many of the same ones, but you have more of a background in some of this stuff than I. I completely sympathize with you when it comes to having a problem with truth or with Badiou’s use of it in general. Me, I never liked the word myself, considering how it is so often used for purposes which have a negative effect (and Badiou recognizes evil, not as something different to truth, but as truths internal possibility). There is a transcription of Badiou’s lecture on the truth-process available on the egs website that you maybe would find interesting.
For my own part, I came to Badiou after weening myself from a Foucauldian “Truth? You must be joking!” and the Deleuzian “power of the False”. Badiou provided what I thought was an acceptable, and yes, even believable account of truth - though it certainly took me a while to buy into it. I don’t think that he always intends for it to be truth with a capital T either. As for truth in the propositions and performatives or whatnot, I was always rather annoyed with those considerations - it reminds me of a brief encounter I had with Rorty that I gave up right away. The thing with these kinds of ‘declarations’ is that they are only in a sense, creating permutations of already existing knowledge within a situation, something like that. The person that runs up to the boat and ‘christens it without christening it’, well I rather like that one because it reminds me of an artistic happening or a Dada event (still events but not Badiouian events per se).
What does Badiou mean by truth? I am going to have a difficult time explaining this and I hope I don’t get too much of it wrong, but: it is always an interruption in the state of a situation (and yes, your understanding of what B means by that is correct). Basically, something intervenes in the situation that was previously unaccounted for, not counted, ‘unknown’ - a sort a non-knowledge in relation to the current epistemic configuration, I suppose. I know that the language he invents for this, his use of set theory and Lacan can get fairly difficult (indeed: ugh!), but the underlying assumptions to me seem fairly simple. Suppose you encounter a work of art, piece of music, literature or poem that to you are completely new, something of a ’shock’. In relation to what was previously understood by you about literature, art, music, this encounter would irreversibly change your understanding of those arts. Wouldn’t this be a truth, a “universal singularity”? If one were to follow from such an event and every consecutive encounter were informed by it (supposing this new subjective fidelity does not become cultural, nationalist, identitarian) wouldn’t it be a truth? It is an event at least, but at the same time, a truth-event.
Of course, how this becomes ‘for all’ is still a difficult point. Often he uses the example of May 68, perhaps Joyce’s Ulysses, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles des Avignon, I don’t know. These are all events (though Badiou is still uncertain as to whether May 68 was actually an event) that undoubtedly reconfigured and ‘punched a hole in’ the knowledge of their time, the effects of which are still being felt today (indeed their time is still our time). I think in a sense this is true universally, and certainly for some subjects who have encountered these works, lived through the event, or at least declare that it took place. This is not for Badiou a matter of hermeneutics, of considering what these events might mean - instead, just as he says in the Paul book, it is a matter of understanding these events as they relate to our current situation and what possibilities, because of those events, are actual possibilities. I, of course, have my own long list of events just as I’m sure you do. Don’t know if any of this helps or if it is just reiterative rambling.
What’s the Tarsky paper you are referring to? I would be curious to see what kind of comparative reading you’re up to here. The Alliez paper is available on the Multitudes website in French, in case you did check the comments box over at my blog.
cheers,
Keith
Comment by Keith — January 12, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
Hey Nate,
Before I turned in last night I spent a little time er…searching for truth. I skimmed over an essay from Balibar in Think Again that actually spends a bit of time on Tarski. It’s beyond my competence at the moment, but Balibar describes Badiou as “the anti-Tarski”, and gives this definition of what Badiou means by truth:
“Badiou is attempting to use meta-mathematical means - that is, mathematics applied to mathematics itself - actually to construct a definition, theory or concept of truth. To be more accurate, he is attempting to demonstrate that that concept is ‘already there’, even though it has not been there for long, and that we have only to recognize it or give it its nam: ‘an indiscernible generic extension of a situation’.”
And in a footnote from elsewhere:
“There could, perhaps, be no better demonstration of the profoundly different philosophical orientations of Badiou and Foucault than this terminological reversal, as it turns the utterance into a relationship with knowledge: for Foucault, ‘veridicity’ or ‘truth-telling’ is the active mode of truth which, at the very heart of knowledges, unmasks and shakes their power-function; for Badiou, veridicity is a linguistic inscription that is inseparable from knowledges (in discursive ‘ency-clopaedias’), whilst the evental truth marks a break with them.”
I used a part of this paper in a previous post, but I’m going to transcribe the last section in its entirety (about three pages in print) on my blog because It seems relevant to this reading, and is just plain interesting.
I apparently had my understanding of truth in Badiou wrong according to Balibar, since he sees B’s truths as changing nothing in the situation in which they occur. This is the opposite of what I was thinking, as I was under the impression that they reconfigured existing knowledges. I’m still not sure about this, and I know that Badiou has said elsewhere that truths produce effects in the situation, although they break with that situation. At this point I’m right there with you, just not really getting what Badiou means by truth. Of course, the confusion, uncertainty, undecidability here produced is a bit ironic.
cheers,
Keith
Comment by Keith — January 13, 2006 @ 9:22 pm
hi Keith,
Thanks for that as well. More from me soonish. Your probably got the reference already but the Tarski piece I had in mind was “The Semantic Conception of Truth”, there’s a copy online here - http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html - if you like. What’s the Balibar piece that you mention? I’d like to read that. Balibar’s on the infinite booklist, near the upper fifth or so.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 13, 2006 @ 9:56 pm
Hey Nate,
The Balibar piece is “The History of a Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy” in Think Again, Contiuum, 2004. I’ve transcribed a portion of it and it’s posted on my blog. Thanks for the Tarski link, I’m going to have to read through that. It’s very relevant to this reading, even if Badiou is the “anti-Tarski”.
- Keith
Comment by Keith — January 14, 2006 @ 4:34 am