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145 of 156 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A watershed in the history of philosophy, February 8, 2006
I had been hoping for some time that someone would write a review for this long-awaited translation. Unfortunately none has appeared and until a more comprehensive and useful review is written, I hope these brief comments will help.
(A brief disclaimer. This review does not summarize or critique the arguments in this book--it would be unjust to attempt to do so in the space of a few paragraphs. I hope only to give some indication of the relevance of this work for those who are interested in Badiou's work and/or those who have heard the name "Badiou" and are trying to find a way in to what his work is all about. If my comments are elliptic or obscure because I use Badiou's terms without providing explication, this is only because I hope that I give enough indication of the direction of his ideas to promote the reading of the actual text.)
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the quality of the translation, since I have not seen the French text. Feltham's familiarity with Badiou's work is unquestionable, however. He was, for example, one of the editors of the collection "Infinite Thought" (also published by Continuum). He has also contributed to a recent issue of `Polygraph' devoted to a discussion of Badiou's work (#17, 2005).
Until this translation, American readers were denied significant access to Badiou's philosophical method and concepts. The key sources were commentaries by people like Peter Hallward, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Eric Alliez (and, of course, Slavoj Zizek). The closest one got to Badiou himself was the collection called "Theoretical Writings" (also published by Continuum). With the exception of "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being", it was difficult to know what Badiou's work was all about since just about all of his other translated works presuppose knowledge of the concepts and terms developed in "Being and Event".
Those who have read Badiou's "Deleuze" will have some idea of what occupies "Being and Event". The title recalls, of course, Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Badiou explicitly agrees with Heidegger that philosophy can only be done on the basis of the ontological question. In "Deleuze", Badiou argues that that great thinker was at bottom a thinker of the One and, as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, the real quarrel between Badiou and Deleuze is over who can speak of being as pure multiplicity. For Deleuze, the concepts are those found in Bergson and the differential calculus; for Badiou one must look to post-Cantorian set theory. In both cases, one cannot approach ontology without a firm understanding of mathematics (anyone who does not have a working grasp of set theory will not be prepared for "Being and Event").
The ontological question cuts a diagonal through various trajectories. Although Badiou accepts the gauntlet Heidegger threw down to philosophy, like Deleuze he thinks that ontology has to be done post-phenomenologically. Badiou even rejects the later Heidegger's notion of "forgetting". Badiou's answer to the ontological question involves a second project in "Being and Event": the articulation of a post-Cartesian (and even a post-Lacanian) subject. If, Badiou says, mathematics is ontology (that is, only mathematics can write being as it is, even if there is no intra-mathematical sense to this writing), the question is no longer the Kantian "how is mathematics possible?" but, rather, if mathematics is the science of being, how is a *subject* possible? In accord with his notion that there are four (and only four) "truth procedures", there are only artistic, scientific, political, and amorous subjects. It is on this idea that Badiou's other works on ethics, politics, art ("inaesthetic"), and so forth, are predicated. In a sense, none of Badiou's other translated works make much sense without the doctrine of the subject laid out in "Being and Event".
(This project of a post-Cartesian subject is announced by the book itself in that it is written as a series of "meditations" that could not be more dissimilar in method to the meditations of either Descartes or Husserl. My own hunch is that any successful engagement and/or refutation of Badiou's work will have to be done on the question of method--viz., Badiou's axiomatic procedure.)
These theses on ontology and subjectivity cross the so-called analytic-continential divide in philosophy. Badiou offers readings of major thinkers throughout the history of philosophy and his readers are asked to have a similarly encyclopedic knowledge of both the post-Kantian analytic and continental traditions. This book is most certainly neither for laypersons, amateurs, or beginning students of philosophy. Throughout the introduction Badiou expresses consternation over the fact that his readers must not only be professional philosophers, but also well-trained in mathematics. One is usually well-trained in one or the other. Analytic philosophy tends to do better at this than Continental (indeed, one of Badiou's goals is to provide a way out of the aporias of the Vienna Circle), but Badiou equally draws from the continental tradition (by way of figures like Hegel, Heidegger, and Lacan) and continental readings of the history of philosophy. (And, until "Being and Event", one couldn't really find much after Quine on the philosophy of set theory except something like Mary Tiles' work from 1989.)
The ontological argument, premised on what Badiou has to say about the One and the presentation of multiplicity (i.e., the question that preoccupied the presocratics) hinges on this: "maintain the position that nothing is delivered by the law of the Ideas, but make this nothing be through the assumption of a proper name. In other words: verify, via the excedentary choice of a proper name, the unpresentable alone as existent; on its basis the Ideas will subsequently cause all admissible forms of presentation to proceed. ... It is because the one is not that the void is unique ... [which is equivalent] to saying that its mark is a proper name". This is how Badiou interprets the axiom of the null (or void) set and distills the question of the One and Many from Being and change (see, e.g., the history and development of the concepts of the calculus). The question is not simply "how does one think non-being?" but also (and Parmenides also recognized this) "how does one name non-being?" The proper name, as Badiou points out in a passage immediately following the above, is not the transcendent God or the promise of the One or presence but the "un-presentation and the un-being of the one" (cf. Derrida's comments on the possibility of a negative theology).
The payoff for working through Badiou's text is nothing less than a revitalization of philosophy (particularly for anyone who thinks philosophy in America has been boring since the waning of Rortyian pragmatism). The ontological debates surrounding Deleuze/Badiou have tended to be conducted in the margins of philosophical discourse in the US (with both thinkers more popular in circles of theory than philosophy and in the pages of journals on culture and politics than Nous or Mind), but the publication of "Being and Event" itself is precisely what Badiou means when he writes of an "event": something that disrupts the current situation. ("Event" and "situation" are, of course, technical terms for Badiou. The most succinct statement of these terms is probably "The Event as Trans-Being" in the Theoretical Writings.) Like his compatriot Ranciere (who too found his own voice after breaking with a youthful Marxism), Badiou is concerned with how it is possible that something new can be seen. "Being and Event" is compulsory for anyone who thinks ontology has been boring since Heidegger (even Millan-Puelles' ambitious "Theory of the Pure Object" fails to satisfy); and for those who weren't convinced by Deleuze that alternative ways to do ontology (viz. Bergson) were dead-ends, "Being and Event" the place to turn. (Whether one ultimately agrees with Deleuze or Badiou, however, is an open question. The basic difference is this: for Badiou, multiplicities are rigorously determined; Deleuze, obviously, denies this. In both cases being is pure multiplicity, nondenumerable, etc)
And for those who may be interested by Deleuze but are wedded to more traditionally analytic ways of writing: Badiou's writing is often praised for its clarity and in many ways it mimes the economy of analytic philosophy, avoiding the obscurity (while preserving the density) of many of his French contemporaries. Badiou has often been compared to Sartre (both being novelists and playwrights in addition to philosophers), but not only does Badiou in many ways stand apart from the French traditions of Sartre and Hyppolite, "Being and Event" is eminently more readable than "Being and Nothingness". Even if Badiou's writing lacks the brilliance of Derrida or Deleuze, this may be because he explicitly tells us that the poetic is subordinate; indeed, Badiou's writing itself is probably best described as "mathematical". While he is not immune to some amount of obscurity in some others of his writings, "Being and Event" certainly cannot be so faulted. At worst one might fault the author for demanding too much of his reader; but if this be a fault it is an admirable one to have, since it is a rare author indeed who can make such a demand.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A new epoch in philosophy, June 6, 2009
Let us imagine the plight of a naive reader who comes to us (because we, for the sake of argument, are people who appear to "know something of philosophy") and says, "I am interested in reading some philosophy because I know philosophers are people who try to grapple with the things of the world in thought, and it seems useful to be acquainted with that sort of thing, but I find it just so difficult! Philosophers are always referring in cryptic ways to other philosophers and using specialized language and I am never sure that they are even discussing things that are relevant to my life at all! It makes my head spin! For example, I hear that to understand Hegel, one must first understand Kant, and to understand Kant one should be acquainted with Hume, which necessitates a knowledge of Descartes, and to know what any of them are talking about requires familiarity with Plato and Aristotle! I don't have the time or the discipline to study the entire history of philosophy, and I can't read everything all at once, so what do I do?"
We could perhaps be helpful by responding thus, "I understand what you mean! Becoming acquainted with a philosophical vocabulary is a time consuming and often thankless process. Nonetheless, it is helpful to realize that philosophical thought is always grappling with the world in a particular context and from a certain historical juncture. It is usually easier to read and understand things that are closer to our own context, more in tune with our own zeitgeist, if you will. Therefore I recommend that you find the one serious philosophical treatise that is most contemporaneous and work your way through it as a starting point. Not only will such a procedure more likely convince you of philosophy's applicability and relevance to contemporary life, but it will also show you what remains useful and relevant in the philosophical tradition, which remains available should you want to pursue it further."
Being and Event is the major philosophical treatise of our time. If Heidegger was the philosopher of the twentieth century (and Hegel of the nineteenth, Kant of the eighteenth, and so forth) then Alain Badiou is the philosopher for the early twenty-first century, and Being and Event his magnum opus, the foundation of his philosophical system. Any exploration of Badiou's thought (which is to say, that which philosophy has to offer for the twenty-first century) should begin with this book, which works out in systematic terms Badiou's fundamental ontology (hint: it's mathematics), and offers a retrieve and reinterpretation of the previous philosophical tradition as ambitious as Heidegger's.
Everyone even vaguely interested in contemporary philosophy owes it to themselves to get acquainted with this book, even though it may be a little difficult, especially if your grasp of mathematics is weak (though anybody who made it through geometry and advanced algebra in high school should be just fine). It is a work that requires a little persistence and patience, though such efforts will be more than amply rewarded in the end.
Or as Slavoj Zizek (one who, if anything else, could at least be said to be someone who knows something of philosophy) has said: "Read [Badiou] with the proper tremor, aware that you are reading a classic, that a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!"
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29 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
major philosophical work, July 5, 2006
Badiou's work is something of a hybrid. His use of analytical philosophy and logical notation runs at variance with the usual Continental practice of abstract linguistic poetizing. The book was completed nearly 20 years ago, though at the time it did not lend itself to ready comprehension because Badiou made four affirmative assumptions that went against the spirit of the time.
For Badiou situations are nothing more than pure in different multiplicities. Consequently differences do not point to norms. If true truths exist they are in different to differences. So cultural relativism can never go beyond trivial statements that different situations exist. Such relativism cannot tell us anything about what, among the differences, looked legitimately matters to subjects. Furthermore the structures of situations in themselves do not deliver truths per se. As a consequence, nothing normative can be drawn from the simple realist examination of the becoming of things. In particular, a truth is solely constituted by a rupturing with the order which supports it, never as in effect of that order. This insight seems to be restating Godel's theorem. Badiou names this type of rupture "the event". For him authentic philosophy begins, not in structural facts such as cultural, linguistic or political perspectives, but uniquely in what takes place in what remains in the form of a strictly incalculable emergence.
Next Badiou claims a subject is nothing other than an active fidelity to the event of truth. This means the subject is a militant truth. Badiou philosophically reintroduced the notion of militant during a time when the consensus of thinkers was that any engagement of this type was archaic. Not only did he found this notion, but also considerably enlarged it. Badiou sees the militant in the political activist working for human rights and environmental justice, but also for the artist-creator, the scientists who opens up by new theoretical field, or the lover who enchants the world. For Badiou the being of truth is generic because it proves itself an exception to any pre-constituted predicate of a situation in which that truth is deployed. In other words, although it is situated within a world, a truth does not retain anything expressible from that situation. A truth concerns everyone in his much as it is a multiplicity that no particular predicate can circumscribe. Therefore, the infinite work of a truth is thus that of a generic procedure. And to be a subject, and not just a simple individual animal, is to be a local active dimension of such a procedure.
Badiou has created a philosophical classic that will puzzle and confound many graduate students and colleagues for years to come. The work is modular a series of 37 meditations upon the previous postulates of classic Western thinkers. Plato and Cantor are taken to task about the meaning of the multiple and the nature of the void. Heidegger and Galileo are examined with regards to the nature of time and infinity, event and ontology. Pascal and Holderlin are interrogated about the nature of choice and inference. Leibniz and Godel are contrasted with regards to the nature of quantity in the limits of formal systems. Badiou becomes more constructive when reviewing the nature of the event as construed by P.J. Cohen. In many ways the event becomes a way of dealing with multiple change and conditions without presuming upon consciousness of time. Likewise, Badiou reinvents the nature of the subject, going beyond the classic critique of Lacan. Grasped in its being, the subject is solely be finitude of the generic procedure, the local effects of an eventual fidelity. What the subject produces is the truth itself, which is an indiscernible part of the situation. However the infinity of this truth transcends it. It is abusive to say that truth is a subjective production. Rather a subject is much taken up in fidelity to the event and suspended from truth; from which it is forever separated by chance. For Badiou the subject is ever situated between the decidable and the ineluctable. As such, he does not have a theory of consciousness so much as a mirroring of events without limit.
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