Covering Part 8 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “Theory of the Subject,” Alex and Andrew discuss the theory of subject and the event, and Badiou’s wider work.

Guest Andrei Rodin contextualizes Badiou’s project through its relation to the wider philosophy of mathematics. Rodin is a mathematician and philosopher with affiliations in France, including the University of Lorraine and the University Paris-Cité, and in Russia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint-Petersburgh State University, as well as the Russian Society for History and Philosophy of Science. He is the author of Axiomatic Method and Category Theory.

Concepts related to the Theory of the Subject

Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, the Future Anterior of Truth, Paul Cohen’s Forcing, Comments on Lacan, Event versus Language, Subject, The Outside, The Undocumented Family, State as Preventing the Event, Decolonize Badiou.

Recap of Being and Event

(Parts 1-3) normal and natural, being qua being, entities multiples sets void, ordinal chains, infinity (natural and real), being is the state and state of situation (form through set theory) (Part 4) turning point, there will always be sites that are presented but whose members are represented, gap, normal and abnormal, un- in- ex-, (Second Half of the Book) how things work, fidelity as a procedure that assigning belonging (temporal), quasi existentialism of the decision, against a construction which is an internal model that grinds through itself, construction always hits an impasse (errancy of the excess of the situation), external model, excess (End of the Book), fidelity to the event, not an act of construction, subtraction, the subtractive procedure is forcing (Cohen), the generic is a product of forcing (Cohen), the four truth procedures (love, art, science, politics) are for subjects, the subject is local configuration of event, fidelity, force, generic.

Further Reading

Manifesto for Philosophy (BE Explainer), Number and Numbers (math notes for BE), Conditions (Four Truth Procedures); BE Trilogy: (1) BE is both abstract and set theoretical, (2) LW is in the world and takes the perspective from world that truth interrupts, and IT (3) takes the perspective of truth to asks where everything else comes from (in favor of infinite against finite); Logic of Worlds is less heroic, undoes the eureka theory of event, more temporality and history, subjectivity as process, phenomenology, additional math theories, category theory; Immanence of Truths, back to set theory, transfinite mathematics and large cardinals, in the Gödel-Cohen debate “I choose Cohen”

Interview with Andrei Rodin

WVO Quine, Set Theory, Meta-Mathematics, Category Theory, Computation, ZFC and Paul Cohen, Constructivist Mathematics, Infinities and Georg Cantor, Euclid and Numbers, Big Numbers, Non-Countable Sets, Axioms, David Hilbert, Generic, Forcing

Links

Rodin page, http://philomatica.org/

Rodin papers, https://varetis.academia.edu/AndreiRodin

Rodin texts, http://philomatica.org/my-stuff/my-texts/

Rodin, Review of Badiou’s “Mathematics of the Transcendental,” http://philomatica.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/braspublished.pdf

Rodin, Axiomatic Method and Category Theory, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-00404-4

Covering Part 7 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “Forcing the Generic,” Alex and Andrew discuss the four truth procedures as a way to force the generic into existence.

Guest Madhavi Menon presents a queer universalist approach through indifference to difference. Menon is Professor of English at Ashoka University in India. She is the author of five books, including Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism published by University of Minnesota Press.

Concepts related to Forcing the Generic,

The Four Truth Procedures (Love, Science, Politics, Art), Critiquing the Encyclopedia of Knowledge, Generic Procedures as Constructing through Negation, The Figure of the Militant, Naming, Jacques Rancière, Generic versus Universal, Gender and Genre, The Undocumented Family, Supernumerary, the Young Marx, Indifference to Difference, Rousseau’s General Will.

Interview with Madhavi Menon

Reading as Surprise, Queerness and Superabundance, Universalism of Failure, Indifference to Difference, Cultural and Identity Politics, Scene of the Street, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Comic Books, the Hijab, Anti-Philosophy, Anti-Identity, GWF Hegel and the Fury of the Absolute, Indian Transgender, Against the Sovereign.

Links

Menon profile, https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/madhavi-menon/

Menon, Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/indifference-to-difference

Covering Part 6 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “The Impasse of Ontology,” Alex and Andrew discuss Badiou’s critique of the discernible and constructible as foreclosures of the event.

Guest Calvin Warren thinks the catastrophe through the post-metaphysics of anti-math and the problem of the one. Warren is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University. His research interests include Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology. He is the author of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Duke University Press).

Concepts related to The Impasse of Ontology

The Cantor-Gödel-Cohen-Easton Symptom, Events as Decisions, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State, The Impasse of Ordinality/Cardinality Set/Number Situation/State and Belonging/Inclusion, Errancy and the Immeasurable, Cardinality, Diagonalization and Cantor/Continuum Hypothesis, Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen, Jacques Lacan and the Impasse of Formalization, The Power Set and the Size of the State, The Subject and the Abyss, Critiques of Leibniz’s Discernible and Constructible Worlds (and Analytic Philosophy’s Symbolic Thought), Rousseau’s General and Undifferentiated  Being of Truth (and Paul Cohen’s Absolutization of Errancy), and all Classic Metaphysics that includes Communist Eschatology (and Large Cardinals, the Virtual Being of Theology, and Transcendence).

Interview with Calvin Warren

Qui Parle on The Catastrophe, Ontological Terror, Alain Badiou and the One as Anti-Black, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Pure Form as Pure Violence, Black aesthetics, Katherine McKittrick, The Ledger as Both the Inclusion of Black Death and the Concealment of Black Life, Catastrophe, Abyss, Nihilism, Nothingness, Pessimism, Post-Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and the Zone of Non-Being, Subtraction, Aesthetics, Romanticism, Afrofuturism

Links

Warren profile, https://aas.emory.edu/people/bios/warren-calvin.html

Warren papers, https://emory.academia.edu/calvinwarren

Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, https://www.dukeupress.edu/ontological-terror

Warren, "The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism," https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749148/pdf