Dear All:
In Conditions Badiou says: “However powerful a truth might be … this power comes to fail on a single term, which in a single movement tips the all-powerful over into the vanity of power, and transports our love of the truth from its appearance, the love of the generic, to its essence, love of the unnameable … For in matters of truth, it is only by enduring the test of its powerlessness that we find the ethic required for the adoption of its power” (quoted Hallward, Badiou, 260).
I don’t have the translation handy, and I give up, but the last lines of the “Do Truths Exist?” chapter in Being and Event say: “Et la toute-puissance d’une verite n’est que de changer ce qui est, afin que puisse etre cet etre innomable, qui est l’etre meme du ce-qui-est.”
So I don’t really understand Badiou’s position here, and it would be nice if someone could explain. On the one hand, he says that the unnameable is the essence of a truth, and that for us to go anywhere near it is falling into the vanity of power (we should stay with the appearance). Limitation, restraint, restricted action in the face of the unnameable is in fact the closest Badiou comes to the formulation of an ethical principle.
On the other hand, if I understand the second quotation correctly, the transforming activity of a truth has as its goal nothing but the presentation of the unnameable, that is, nothing less than the being of beings.
The truth is an ontological operation that, whatever else it does, presents being as such.
Being as such is the unnameable regarding which we should exercise great caution. A third quotation, from “Philosophy and Truth”: “the ethic of truth resides entirely in a sort of caution as far as its powers are concerned. The effect of the undecidable, of the indiscernible, and of the generic, or in other words, the effect of the event, the subject, and the truth, must recognize the unnameable as a limitation of its path.”
So I don’t get it! But I’d love to understand why I am not getting it, as I don’t presume to have raised any objection. Thanks in advance, if anyone could help.
All best, Alberto
Sat, 02/28/2009
Dear all,
I have a series of questions about “counting” in Badiou, a procedure I am finding difficult to grasp without intuitively visualising individual human agents doing the counting.
I find it hard to countenance the idea of a single vast encyclopaedia of human knowledge “being-somewhere”. For example, “every finite multiple of presented multiples is a part which falls under knowledge, even if this only be by its enumeration.” (Being & Event, p.331) Although I can accept that the veridical is that which can be counted, being finite and discernible, it is the “always already” counted that I’m finding problematic: “for every finite part one can always say that it has already been discerned and classified by knowledge.” (p.333)
Who or what is counting? How is a “count” already accomplished? (when the word itself suggests a time before the count) How does the finite multiple “fall under knowledge”? This suggests a movement from one state to another. If it is always already counted then wouldn’t knowledge correspond only to the realm of presentation rather than representation?
Perhaps the encyclopaedia, which is the totality of veridicity, only operates on the symbolic level and is a necessary decision for Badiou, functioning much like the “we proceed as if” of the axiom of truth? Have I missed this decision?
More specifically, in the section “Thought of the Generic and Being in Truth” (Being & Event, pp.337-343) it strikes me that Badiou personifies Knowledge as a One, particularly in the single sentence paragraph on p. 332:
“Although knowledge does not want to know anything of the event, of the intervention, of the supernumerary name, or of the operator which rules the fidelity - all being ingredients that are supposed in the being of an enquiry - it nevertheless remains the case that an enquiry cannot discern the true from the veridical: its true-result is at the same time already constituted as belonging to a veridical statement”
Again, I struggle with this idea of an impersonal or detatched “knowledge” always already counting the finite multiples. Instinctively I feel that the numerable elements comprising the encyclopaedia must be counted by human agents engaged in enquiries (without access to the whole encyclopaedia). In line with this, Badiou seems to concede a point to relativism with “Statements…can be held without difficulty to be veridical in this or that domain of knowledge”. (p.333)
Accepting that domains of knowledge are subsets of Knowledge, is the Encyclopaedia a kind of Not-One of Knowledge? If it were then in practice would it not be untotalizable too? Does Badiou avoid this elsewhere by claiming that when he refers to Knowledge in this way then he involved in “the discourse of the master”?
And again, more fundamentally, how does the count operate?
Thanks in advance if you can help with this, and sorry for bombarding with questions, some of which I’m sure are the result of misreading on my part,
Best wishes, Chris
»