Badiou and indifferent being : a critical introduction to Being and Event / William Watkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Watkin, William, 1970- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Badiou, Alain. Etre et l'événement.

Badiou, Alain.

Events (Philosophy).

Ontology.

Set theory.

Physical Description:

viii, 288 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.

Summary:

The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: 'I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy'. Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements of Being and Event - the void, the multiple, the set and the event - Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section-by-section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers. Book jacket.

Contents:

The Consistency of Inconsistency 6

Subtractive Being 8

Nonrelationality 10

Indifference 11

Set Theory 13

Retroactive Axiomatic Reasoning 16

Transmissibility, Intelligibility and Communicability 19

Theory of the Subject 20

Part 1 Indifferent Being

1 Being: The One and the Multiple 27

How to Make Intelligible the Impossible Proposition One Is-not (Meditation One) 28

The One as Operational Count-as-one 29

The Ancient Problem of Classes 31

Situations and Structures 33

The Multiple 35

Presentation of Presentation 36

Reasoning on Being by Means of Axioms 40

2 Being: Separation, Void, Mark 45

Meditation Two 45

Set Theory and Aggregation as Collection (Meditation Three) 46

Axiom of Separation 48

Notation and Self-predication 50

The Pure Multiple Is Real 53

The Void: Proper Name of Being (Meditation Four) 56

The Void and Nothing 57

Void as Nomination 59

ZF+C: The Nine Axioms of Contemporary Set Theory (Meditation Five) 61

Axiom of Extensionality 62

Axiom of Replacement or Substitution 64

The Void Set and In-difference 65

Conclusion: Pure Multiple and the Void 67

3 Being and Excess 71

Powerset Axiom (Meditation Seven) 72

Point of Excess 74

Void as Name 77

Four Kinds of One-ness: One, Count-as-one, Unicity, Forming-into-one 80

The State (Meditation Eight) 84

Threat of the Void 87

Belonging, Inclusion and Parts 91

Typologies of Being 94

States and Indifference (Meditation Nine) 98

4 Nature and Infinity 101

Nature is Normal (Meditation Eleven) 101

Transitive Sets: Cardinal and Ordinal (Meditation Twelve) 103

Nature and Minimality 105

Nature and Intrication 108

The Inexistence of Nature 109

Potential and Actual Infinity 110

Proving the Actual Infinite 111

Doubling and Dedekind Infinites 113

The Limit 117

Succession and Limit 120

The Upper or Maximal Limit 121

Succession 124

Conclusion on Being 127

Part 2 Indifferent Events

5 The Event: History and Ultra-One 133

Historical Singularities (Meditation Sixteen) 136

Historical Singularities and Evental Sites: Examples 138

Primal Ones and the Edge of the Void 143

Singularity vs. Normality 144

Self-predication: The Matheme of the Event (Meditation Seventeen) 146

The Problem of Naming 149

Axiom of Foundation (Meditation Eighteen) 152

Implications of Foundation 155

Coda: Un-relation 158

6 The Event, Intervention and Fidelity 161

The Wager: Yes or No (Meditation Twenty) 164

Intervention 165

Seven Consequences of the Event 168

Axiom of Choice (Meditation Twenty-two) 175

Choice is Indifferent 178

Due to Choice, Singularities Exist and they Are Indifferent 182

Fidelity, Connection (Meditation Twenty-three) 184

7 The Generic 189

Continuum Hypothesis (Meditation Twenty-seven) 189

The Thought of the Generic (Meditation Thirty-one) 194

Discernment and Classification 195

Truth and Knowledge: The Indifference of Avoidance 196

Generic Procedure 199

The Matheme of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-three) 201

Easton's Theorem (Meditation Twenty-six) 203

Conditioning the Indiscernible 206

Indiscernible or Generic Subsets 209

The Existence of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-four) 212

Extension 216

Is There a Name for the Discernible such that it Can Be Said to Exist? 217

8 Forcing: Truth and Subject 221

Theory of the Subject (Meditation Thirty-five) 221

Chance 224

Faith 225

Names 227

Forcing (Meditation Thirty-six) 229

The Proof of Forcing 233

From the Indiscernible to the Undecidable 240

Conclusion (Meditations Thirty-six and Thirty-seven) 244

Bridge: From Being and Event to Logics of Worlds 246.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-276) and index.

ISBN:

1350015679

9781350015678

1350015660

9781350015661

OCLC:

960089453