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Beyond Ideal and Real or Echoes of an impossible rigour: Alain Badiou’s Post-Cantorian Platonism

In a commentary on a poem by Paul Célan, Alain Badiou – with whom I’m going to be almost exclusively

preoccupied today – says that, following the collapse of Marxist-Leninism, we now live in an epoch

which sorely lacks what Célan, in one of his poems, calls a ‘tent-word’.

By ‘tent-word’ Badiou explains, Célan offers us an image of a rallying point for ‘generic humanity’, i.e.,

for an idea under which human beings might come toegether insofar as they have been subtracted

from the manifold differences around which they usually form collectives.

Célan’s missing “tent-word” therefore, names for Badiou, what he thinks was not only a dream , but a

project of the last century: a century which he sees as marked by the idea of finding or inventing new

forms of solidarity, of living, and working together, in short of ways of saying “we” that would cut across

not only ethnic, or national lines, but also cultural and linguistic traditions, something which would

dispense with all those neurotically fussed-over and aggressively maintained micro-identities that mark

an epoch in which a growing global homogeneity is (as every sociologist has pointed out for the last

twenty years) paradoxically marked with a growing tribalism.

It is out of opposition to this narcissism and this tribalism that, today, I would like to pose a question.

The question to which I allude in the following paper, and the question which I think we are, ultimately

gathered here to address is this:,can “Plato” today play the role of something that (like Celan’s tent-

word): might -- through bringing together concepts, phenomena, indeed aspects of reality whose

gathering was hitherto unauthorized, nameless, and unprecedented -- shake the foundations of

contemporary philosophy such that it might break with the canons of knowledge in pursuit of something

like truth (conceived in the manner of Badiou).

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To put this differently:

How and to what extent, would, should, or do any of us claim to be “Platonists”, TODAY?

At the outset, I think it should be clear that by ‘being a Platonist today’, I don’t expect (and don’t want)

any of us to be servants of a mythically infallible Platonic dogma. If Plato is, in any sense, a name for us

to conjure with today, it will not be because any of us will make for him, the unphilosophical subject of a

catechism: (“I swear that I believe in the hyper-uranian forms, yea, even ‘though the issue of their

plurality should entangle me in the third man argument and the Parmenides should confound my wits.”),

but rather because there is something within his thought, which still compels us to think, and work, and

to oppose the sophistry of our times.

But, if we are all of us, at least readers, and possibly -- thinking of a famous remark of Aristotle’s --

friends of Plato: to what extent do we take ourselves to be Platonists?

Maybe, if everything about Badiou that I’m about to say seems egregious and silly (as I think some of

you will think) this could, at least count, as my minimal contribution to the session.

But before I try and quixotically introduce Badiou’s work to you, let’s me make these provisional points

about Badiou’s relation to Plato:

Badiou is, I think, indispensable for any question of contemporary Platonism. This is because and not

despite the fact that there are few initially less Platonic-sounding doctrines than some of Badiou’s most

fundamental formulae.
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Nonetheless, as is well known, Badiou claims that his own philosophy is, at least in some respect, an

attempt to perform something analogous to Plato’s intervention into the intellectual, moral, spiritual,

political situation of Athens after its defeat in the Peloponessian War in our own time.

What Badiou finds in Plato’ -- something which he thinks it is both urgent and necessary to repeat in the

present day (i.e. in the present political, economic and above all ideological situation) is the following:

First, a radical critique of doxa, as opposed to the more moderate (let’s say Aristotelian) vision of always

starting from those endoxai -- which, though obscuring the truth, – may also be said to reveal it.

Second, and related to this first point: Badiou thinks that a “Platonic” philosophy demands – this strange

thing: a separation of truth from meaning.

Third (and this at the centre of my own current thesis), Badiou, like Jacques Lacan finds in Plato a

rejection of what today, has for too long seemed like, the obvious opposition between ‘subjective,

creative, enthused thought’, and ‘scientific, rationalist, or rigorous thought.”

Fourth, Badiou, famously, proposes that philosophy has four conditions: “science, love, art, and

politics.”, and claims Platonic inspiration both for the choice of these four conditions and for the idea

that philosophy will proceed by (and gain its richness) form attempting to deal with all four.

Fifth, Badiou’s vision of philosophy in the Platonic mould is a vision of philosophy as something that

performs the previous four operations in ways that help to distinguish philosophy from what I’m I’m

going to call today two “eternal” rivals or simulacra of philosophy which are first identified and engaged

(in the military sense) by Plato.

To understand the first point?l Doxai, meaning, truth

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The second of the five points above is, perhaps the most difficult, the most objectionable and the most

important of Badiou’s self-described “Platonic” gestures: this is the notion that truth must be conceived

as being separate form (i.e. distinct from) menaing.

To understand his formula, we have to understand Badiou’s claim to be making a Platonic intervention

against what he conceives as the dominant gestures of philosophy in the present, something that he

thinks links, ‘analytic’ philosophy in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein and continental philosophy under

the influence of Heidegger together as a ‘dominant sophistry’ of our times.

To start with Heidegger: it’s well known that Heidegger both inherits and advances Husserl’s

phenomenological program.

To use the first of many grotesque simplifications:

One of the main impulses behind Husserlian phenomenology is a realization of the difference, between

what is genuinely experienced, and what is derivatively experienced. In phenomenology, the problem of

what I’m calling “derivative experience” is that it is not only anaemic and less deserving of serving as a

basis for knowledge, but that it leads to illusions that are never detected as illusions because they

structure not only the way that we encounter phenomena, but even the way in which phenomena

appear to us. To put this more technically: at the heart of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophies is a

critique of the regnant neo-Kantianism of this day. This critique is essentially a critique of the idea that

experience is synthetic, i.e. that it arises through the operations of the mind coming into contact with

‘sense-data’. In opposing this, Husserl and Heidegger attempt to retrieve the Platonic-Aristotelian

notion of noesis, where noesis is the faculty, and in another sense, of grasping the ‘whole’ prior to

grasping any particular parts, such that all that ‘appears’, or all that is given to the perceiving-subject is

given under the aspect of the initial apprehension of the ‘whole’ of reality (in Heideggerese, the pre-
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understanding of, or relationship to “Being”, in the light of which various beings are concealed by their

revelation, or obscured by their very obviousness.

To see what, I mean, by the phenomenological suspicion of ‘derivative’ experience: I will offer an

example:

Before writing this talk, I did a kind of trial run before some kindly analytic philosophers. One of these

generous interlocutors, a mathematician, said: look this is all very interesting, but amidst all this talk of

the axiom of extensionality, have you, Bryan Cooke ever worked your way through a bona fide

mathematical proof?

Phenomenologists are concerned with something like the spirit of this objection. They are concerned

with the ways in which every realm of human knowledge and experience has a tendency to what

Heidegger calls ‘falleneness’ (Verfallenheit). The consequence of ‘falleneness’, in less theological, more

Husserlian sounding language is that the concepts and categories that once emerged out of the heart of

experience, now come to structure and order experience in ways that obscure and, even deaden, the

experiential basis from which they come. Thus, by its own manifestos, phenomenology attempts to

combat the way in which encounters with the “things themselves” (Sacher-in-Selbst, as opposed to the

Kantian –ding-an-sich) get replaced with a kind of hand-wavy shibboleth badminton and unthinking

invocations of ‘things that everyone knows’ , or that are ‘obvious’.

The method of phenomenological reduction is dedicated to fighting this ‘sedimenting’ tendency by

which concepts and categories become obscure to us, precisely in the moment of their indispensability

(i.e. when they have become obvious).

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At the same time, however, although philosophy in the phenomenological and, by extension,

hermeneutic traditions, attempts to bracket out presuppositions of what is being experienced , the goal

of this bracketing is in fact to “look closer” or “listen harder” to what is presented in experience. In this

sense, phenomenology can be said to be motivated by something like an ‘empiricist’ critique of what

might be called naive empiricism.

Thus, all of phenomenology denies, the idea that we can build up concepts through an empirical

manifold. For Husserl, and Heidegger, as much as for Ricoeur or Derrida, we cannot encounter

anything without first conceptually delimiting it, such that, for instance, to use examples that worry

Husserl and Heidegger in particular -- both anthropology and psychology are only possible because we

have a prior concept of man, and psyche that delimits the field of anthropological or pscyhological

phenomena to be investigated while remaining itself obscured in its very obviousness. (Foucault will

take this phenomenological critique to its, in a way, self-critical limit with his discussion of ‘man and his

doubles’ in Les Mots et la chose.]

It is in the spirit or this fundamental intuition of phenomenology through which Heidegger arrives at the

question of ‘being’ and not a childish inability to distinguish between a purely logical use of the copula

and an existential use. Instead, Heidegger extends the phenomenological critique of empiricism as far

as it can go by saying that in having any encounter whatsoever with the world we must “always,

already” have had a pre-understanding or ‘comportment towards’ not only the specific, pre-delimited

‘region’ in which phenomena reveal themselves, but the most general possible region, which which

Heidegger calls ‘being’.

Now, Baidou, agrees with some of what is said in the phenomenological tradition, while also subjecting

it to perhaps the most relentless critique attempted in this century.

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For instance, he shares the idea, with phenomenology of the critique of “synthetic” empiricism. In

addition, Badiou accepts Heidegger’s notion of an ontic-ontological, difference, as a distinction between

dealing (ontically with something), and dealing with the ‘that’ of which every-thing participates.

However, Badiou’s concept of Being has in common with anti-Heideggerianism of much of the analytic

tradition, the sense that being as opposed to “a being” or group of beings is something eminently

uninteresting.

For Badiou being is a ‘pure or inconsistent multiple’ or ‘what-there-is-but-before-any-structure-that-

would-enable-us-to-consider-it-as-in anyway determinate’ (or in the language of Being and Event

‘coutned-as-one’)

Although he does not use the Greek word, I think Badiou would happily say that being is apeiron, but

with the provisio that its infinity (and indeterminacy) is of infinite orders of infinity or

indeterminateness.

To make sense of this, we need to see why Badiou thinks that his own ontology (which I have not

explained yet) is a necessary foil to the phenomenological and hermeneutic trends that have dominated

continental philosophy for the last 20th centuries. In essence, Baidou’s critique of this tradition is that it

is implicitly and irrevocably religious, despite its vaunted (and sometimes sincere) methodological

agnosticism, or even crusading atheism.

But how are phenomenology and hermeneutics irreparably religious (and what is bad this?)

Badiou thinks that by always approaching phenomena (as is done in phenomenology) from the

standpoint of our being – again --‘always, already’ amidst the correlate between intention and intuition,

noesis and noemata, world and experience; our prejudices and those of the author whose text we are

reading:, Badiou thinks there is at the heart of both phenomenology and hermeneutics insufficient
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room, for the suggestion that truth or reality might be utterly alien to human things, to what we know

of the world, or our ways of speaking and acting. What he finds ‘religious’ about phenomenology is the

sense, that phenomenology’s implicit confidence in appearances (and focus on what can be

experienced) presumes, he thinks, a privilege of human ways of ‘disclosing the world’ that doesn’t allow

room for the kind of devastating effects of science (as well as psychoanalysis and Marxism) to suggest

that, in Platonic terms, all of our nomoi, our institutions, conventions, customs that enable us to survive

and get around may be something that don’t just partially obscure the truth even as they reveal it, but

that distort it fundamentally.

In this, Badiou’s attitude resembles that of Deleuze, whose work is also marked by a desire to move

beyond the ‘representationalist’ illusion of subject and world, and the interminable ‘epistemological’

questions that follow in the wake of this metaphysical vision.

Like Deleuze, Badiou is hostile to the metaphysical or speculative conservatism, which would restrict

metaphysics to that which appears towards the ‘human’ subject (however much, this subject, undergoes

the shift from particular, empirical human being to the ‘transcendental’ subject who is the ideal locus of

all experience). In particular, he rejects phenomenology’s (and particulary Heidegger’s opposition to

the ‘mathematisation of Being’ with which, modern science, and Cartesian philosophy begins. Instead

of finding this the occasion for a ‘crisis of the human sciences’, Badiou sees the ‘mathematisation of

nature’ as a great and essential step in the emancipation and enlightenment of human beings.

Like Jacques Lacan (who Badiou refers to, on a number of his occasions, as ‘his master’ and ‘the greatest

of our dead’), mathematisation is not to be experienced as a tragic loss of the phenomenal world,

deplorable for ‘unhinging’ human beings from ‘common sense’ (conceived morally, politically, or

religiously), but the beginning of a revolution of the intellect, in which the mind – by transcending the

‘intuitive’, the ‘natural’, and ‘appearances’ altogether, manages to enter the fundamentally creative,
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but also rigorous dimension of formalization, i.e. of pure abstraction. There are many reason that

Badiou links this to emancipation rather than disaster, among which, for the moment, I should mention

1) His idea that what is essential to modern science is not its empiricism, but its willingness to

break with all ‘intuitive’ conceptions of nature, in favour of the abstract rigour of mathematics

And

2) He conceives of the desire to ‘save the appearances’, as a fundamentally reactionary move,

designed, to limit the transcendence of thought according to the dictates of a (particular)

morality.

And

3) He realizes that the principles of ‘equality’, and ‘universality’, as well as ‘justice’ and ‘truth’ are

not to be found empirically, i.e. via the Aristotelian method of starting with the ‘endoxai’ or

what ‘everyone knows’. Truth, like justice, requires an assault on what is taken to be knowledge

at a given moment: it is, in its essence, transcendent rather than immanent, directed towards

the infinite rather than the finite.

I could say more on this, but Badiou’s criticisms of phenomenology (which I’ve only glossed here) have

made him a kind of philosophical godfather to the diverse philosophical movement known as

‘speculative realism’. Speculative realism (which is really more of an intellectual ‘brand’ than a

movement, but which I do not have time to describe in detail here) has been articulated in terms of a

connection to ‘weird realism’. ‘Weird realism’ is the philosophical principle that what is presented to us

via contemporary natural science (and particularly physics) should lead to the opposite of the

metaphysical modesty favoured by today’s neo-positivists, or ‘scientific realists’ in the analytic or

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‘naturalist’ tradition. In other words, it points out that the results of contemporary science are

completely counter-intuitive. Far from grounding a ‘realist’ picture of the world, in which we can trust

to a kind of scientifically reconstructed version of ‘common sense’, the scientific picture of the universe

gives us a vast, baroque, teeming, insane vision, far more suited to “pre-critical” metaphysical

speculation on the manner of 17th and 18th century metaphysics because science, far from securing what

Wilfred Sellars calls the ‘manifest image’ of the world provides us with a vision of the universe that

shows not the reliability but the radical limitations and even destitution of human perspective, even as

it shows us that, the mind can sail pass these limitations.

At the same time, as they applaud science for the narcissistic wounds it imposes on human beings

(Freud), Badiou and the ‘speculative realists’ are not in anyway motivated by a scientistic or positivist

agenda. Instead, as the Hegelian-inflected word ‘speculative’ should suggest nothing could be further

from the spirit of his philosophy than the idea that philosophy is a ‘janitorial service after the real

parties held by the scientists.”

Here, incidentally, we can see another point on which Badiou claims that his own enterprise is Platonic:

namely, that it is part of what it means (and has always been a Platonist) not only to challenge inherited

ways of thinking and acting (using mathematics as a model to that which grasps the truth separate from

the vagaries of everyday language but also, from the dizzying play of meaning implied by poetic-

religious, and philosophical language.

Thus, what Baidou wants from mathematics (that he thinks Plato also thinks) is the sense that reality

and indeed truth can be risked only at the price of, if not a total break, a radical transformation of the

“manifest images” of human thinking and acting. The historical precedent for this gesture is the way in

which Plato and his students challenged the economic-political division of the city of Athens (and all of

its ‘sacralised’ nomoi), with the proportions of mathematics.

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* * *

But, okay. How does what has been said so far relate to Plato?

To answer this, I think we need a provisional answer to a very difficult question: what is philosophy for

Plato?

This is not an easy question. Although statements about philosophy and even ‘the philosopher’ abound,

they are spread across the dialogues, inflected ambiguously by philological problems questions of the

context of a formula within a specific dialogue, not to mention the issue of how to interpret the

dialogues as a whole.

Nonetheless, I believe that, we can still attempt a negative definition by contrast with Plato’s portraits

(especially in the Protagoras and the Gorgias) of the main rival to the philosopher: the Sophist.

The sophist, of course, is constantly and explicitly portrayed in Plato, as the rival of the philosopher.

But, although this is less explicit, I want to claim that in fact, the philosopher in Plato has another rival,

who is himself the rival of the sophist: and that in fact, we can make sense of Plato’s idea of the

philosopher, best by following the double contrast between philosophy and both of these figures, that I

think are deployed in the name of making sense of what philosophy is.

The “second” or less obvious rival to the philosophy (in Plato) can be found , I suggest by thinking of

Socrates’ trial as portrayed by Plato.

In Plato’s Apology, we all know that Socrates argues that his prosecutors are not his first accusers, and

that in fact, the jury’s “where there’s smoke there’s fire” sense of Socrates guilt comes less from the

uninspired stick-rubbing of Meletus and Anytos but from the vivid, unforgettable, and -- presumably for

Plato -- scurrilous portrait of Socrates in Aristophanes’ ‘The Clouds’.

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Now, it’s well known that the Aristophanic comedies contain a critique of contemporary Athens, as a

once great, but now decadent democratic city, that has been seized with the madness of hubris such

that it is no longer a brave city, but a mighty, expansive, wealthy, imperialistic power, whose overly- (for

Aristophnaes) empowered masses have been whipped up into a frenzy by demagogues and charlatans

who have embroiled Athens in a seemingly interminable, disastrous, bloody, pointless, war.

But this courageous stand against the order of his day, should not prevent us from seeing that

Aristophanes’ critique of the Athens of his time is not that of a ‘progressive reformer’ but instead of a

conservative defender of the old traditions. Like Thucydides, Aristophanes seems to think that

somewhere after the Persian Wars, and the formation of the Delian League, Athens lost or renounced

the traditional virtues that once made her into the saviour of Greece.

Now it’s true that Aristophanes’ comedies are also full of a joyful, bawdy irreverence to all things and

particularly to the politicians, and ideological fashions of his day. Prima facie, this does not sit well with

the idea that he is a stuffy defender of old ways. But in fact, this is less incongruous than it looks.

Aristophanes’ focus on the body and its needs, the pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, lustful human

beings: is actually entirely compatible with his perspective that there can exist older and better laws that

are more soundly based on the nature of human beings than the modish ones that now reign. In this

Aristophanes resembles not only conservative satirists like Swift and Evelyn Waugh, but also the authors

of South Park, who are also famous for combining bawdiness, hilarity, and irreverence with a rejection

of (what is understood to be) ‘progressive’.

If Aristophanes therefore holds the classically ‘conservative’ belief that human nature constantly

threatens any given nomoi, he also may believe that some laws can be more or less in keeping with this

nature.
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(Leo Strauss commenting on Aristophanes’ comic Muse, brilliantly suggests that, for Aristophanes, the

comic s opposed to the tragic by the fact that it shows it can start with what is ‘lowest’ in human beings,

the belly, the genitals and so on, but rises from this to the heights of truth and art. In other words, it is

represented by the dung beetle which the protagonist of Peace uses to ascend to the heavens and

challenge the gods.” [quote unquote Strauss, The Problem of Socrates.

As such, the “Aristophanic” position is a constant critique on innovation, whether it be the democratic

reforms of Pericles (and before him Cleisthenes) or the more morally ambitious

customs/conventions/opinions which he sees in the followers of Socrates.

In the Clouds, as everybody knows, Socrates is portrayed as a farcical figure, whose celebrity is a marker

of the city’s current tendency to go into puerile ecstasies over the latest shiny novelties: Aristophanes’s

Socrates is, therefore, precisely a sophist who says nonsensical, preposterous things, with the effect, of

turning the world on its head, and making what is obviously wrong seem right.

Now, a venerable (if unfashionable) tradition, in Platonic scholarship (to which I happen to subscribe!)

holds that Plato deeply loved Aristophanes and, in fact, (as Diogenes Laertius says) wrote a moving

epitaph for him. We can see intimations of this in the fact that the comic poet plays such a pivotal role

in the Symposium – where he is, not only the author of one of that dialogue’s greatest speeches, but one

of the last three people to stay awake after the entrance of Alcibiades.)

But while I do think, that the tradition that describes the affection of Plato for Aristophanes is right to

say (as Leo Strauss does) that Plato’s Socrates is a Socrates who has learnt from Aristophanes, I do not

think, that this is sufficient ground for, as Strauss and his students do, arguing that Plato’s Socrates

renounces metaphysics in his youth in the name of ethics and politics.

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Leaving this (doubtless contentious) point hanging for a moment, I’ll turn to the more obvious rival to

the philosopher as presented in Plato’s dialogues: the sophist. We know that, in many ways, the sophist

resembles the philosopher -- i.e. that sophistry is a kind of perennial shadow cast by philosophy.

Indeed, Socrates is frequently mistaken for a sophist (even, we might say with Socratic irony) by himself:

sophistry seems to share with philosophy a focus on pointing out the insufficiency of conventional

answers, the instability and self-blindness of conventional language, the limits, obscurity and

contradictions of inherited wisdom and so on.

Indeed, it can even be argued, that both Socrates and sophists produce the stupefying effect in their

interlocutors that makes Plato’s Socrates compare himself to a sting-ray. But apart from the (important

fact) that the Platonic philosopher does not charge money for his teaching, the distinction, between

philosopher and sophist, is supposed to be connected to the way in which the philosopher and the

sophist subject people to the play of aporiai and dialectics for fundamentally different purposes.

In the Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates, will argue that Callicles (one of his most ‘existential’ rivals as Eric

Voegelin puts it), does not really scorn convention in the way he thinks he does (a similar argument is

put to Thrasymachos in the first book of the Republic.)

This is because, according to Socrates accusation Callicles is ultimately a lover of the demos, by which

he means, that he is not only in love with a boy of that name, but that Callicles, for all his aristocratic airs

is a lover of the people, not someone, who has the interests of the people at heart, but someone who is,

despite his protestations to the contrary, completely concerned with the perception of others. Thus,

through the dance of the elenchos, Socrates shows that Callicles is in love with “respectable” opinion.
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In contrast, the philosopher (Socrates) is shown to undertakesdialectics in the name of such bizarre

(empirically unobservable and publically disapproved of things) things as truth, justice, or true being. In

short the philosopher is engaged with ideas which should be understood as, in their essence, things that

do not exist in any obvious way. The sophist then in lacking the ‘ideas’, persistently confuses ‘what is’

(truth, the real) what can be manipulated according to what appears to be the laws of the present

situation.

If we operate with this conception of the sophist, we might think that one of the ways we might respond

to an Aristophanic critique of sophistry would be to go down what I think of as l Xenophon’s path: i.e.

that philosophy could distinguish itself from sophistry by learning (as Aristophanes might want an heir of

Socrates to learn): a “proper” respect for practical things. In Xenophon, the erotic restlessness of

philosophy is tempered by practical virtues like moderation. These virtues which, are useful, perhaps

even paramount in acting (conceived morally), but a hindrance to thinking.

Although, there is some plausibility to this view of Plato’s post-Aristophanic Socrates, I think that we

must insist that Plato is not Xenophon (and that it is in fact one of the errors of some of Leo Strauss’s

reading to confuse the two.)

For the moment, I’ll just say, that a “Xenophonic” compromise involves a much more stringent and

much less ambiguous subordination of theoretical eros to praxis, that we find in Plato’s dialogues.

To take just one example of many, as much as one can read the Republic as making many suggestions

that the city built by the sons of Ariston will be incredibly difficult to realize, if not inhumanly

improbable, I do not think that there is a real case to be made, that everything that Plato says about

justice in the soul, in the city, or as necessarily posited away from what we know of as reality, is part of a

satire, or that, in a way that would suggest Plato’s real or “esoteric” teaching is that the Athenians

should simply maintain their ancestral laws more carefully. To interpret Plato this way, would be to say,
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ultimately that Plato advocates the choice of the shadows on the wall of the cave for the light of the

sun.

Instead, Plato’s conception of philosophy rejects both the sophist’s path of reducing thought to a

technique, and what I am calling the “Burkean” or “Aristophanic” idea that any thought which would

claims to put all instituted forms and norms to the question – as opposed to respect for traditions, gods,

and tried and true ways to the question is indistinguishable from sophistry: unless it receives its

practical wisdom from a non-philosophical (presumably divine?) source, or operates in a mythic register.

Now, Badiou – to come back to him at last – thinks that his own philosophical system, also

simultaneously counts as sailing between the rock of, if you like, anti-philosophical conservatism, and

sophistical faux-radicalism of the kind that is likely to serve a more dynamic, but nonetheless

entrenched forms of (economic, political, and sometimes even erotic) power.

Badiou’ talks explicitly of contemporary sophistry, by which he refers both to the academic, and ‘sub-

academic’ formulae which suggest that the (literally?) stupefying “play of differences” we find in the

slipperiness of meanings and the vagueness of concepts, should result in a generalized suspicion (or

outright mockery) of every notion of ‘truth’, as well as of any notions of living, thinking, other than those

that seem obviously to be ‘the way of the world’ at this time, or the province of a given (already-

existing) ‘culture’ or ‘lanugage-game’.

But against either side of my twofold schema (sophists and Aristophaneans), Badiou also tends to use

the term ‘sophistry’ to those aspects of contemporary academic philosophy that in the (noble) goal of

fighting modern sophistry, mistake philosophy for a series of algorithms, and bien pensant opinions that

are inflated to nothing less than the beating heart of rational thought.
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The link for Badiou as for Plato, between sophistry, and what we might call ‘unintentionally sophistical

anti-sophsitry’ is that both sides conflate what is with what is known to work and produce results. Thus,

while the sophist fetishises the plurality of differences, against truth and knowledge, the sophistical,

anti-sophsit attempts to fetishise some portion of the contemporary ‘encyclopaedia’ (Badiou’s term), as

being the only possible bulwark against sophistry, and anarchy, thus sharing with her sophistical

opponent, the desire to misrecognise truth as knowledge.

To introduce what I’m about to say: Badiou has a nice formula in his second ‘big book’ Logics of Worlds

which he uses to distinguish his own position from what he thinks of as dominant, sophistry. (both

sophisticated academic versions although more generally the prevailing ideology).

The dominant ideology of our day, he says is that there are only bodies and languages (by which he

means physical things and then cultural-linguistic-social things). Against this he offers the formula that

there are only [sic] bodies and languages, but also truths.

Let’s see what this means.

Difficult Discussion Incoming

Talking about Badiou’s philosophy, unfortunately involves making preliminary sense of such gnomic

propositions as ‘mathematics is ontology’, and ‘the one is not’.

Now, we saw earlier that for Badiou as for Heidegger, we never encounter being, only beings, and

further that, for the most part, ‘every being is (as Lebiniz says) a being.

Baidou’s ontology rests, on what he admits is a decision that the ‘one is not’, which leads him to treat

being as he says ‘qua being’ as a ‘pure multiple’ as in multiplicity without any unifying principles or

structures: a chaos, which is never “presented” (a difficult term on which I intend to say little) and

whose proper name is the void.’

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All these terms and expressions may at first seem obfuscatory, if notinsane. But I’ll try and explain what

they mean.

To begin, with there is an element of Baidou’s ontology that would be (or should be) uncontroversial in

the history of metaphysics: this is the extent to which Badiou grants that everything, i.e. in every-thing

in the world, is, I’m going to call it ‘sort of ‘one’’, or what he calls ‘a one-multiple’ something

ambiguously whole (or self-identical). Thus, he realizes (as Plato and Hegel also do) the strange paradox

of reality by which everything can (and must be) treated as ‘one’ despite the fact, that everything that

we ‘count as one’ is also composed of parts that can themselves can be taken as (a collection) of ‘ones’.

But in referring to ‘being’ as pure multiplicity that is presented (or structured) as one-multiples, Badiou is

trying to take seriously a proposition from Plato’s Parmenides that in context is supposed to play the

role of a reductio ad absurdum. Thus, in the Parmenides, it is said that if, ‘being is not one, than nothing

is.’ [The Greek uses the negative ‘mE’ with on]

Badiou’s formula is that: the one is not, but that there is something of the one. (The phrase is from

Jacques Lacan in response to Jacques-Alain Miller: il y a de l’un.

In other words, being itself is totally inaccessible to thought, because being can only be presented in

beings i.e. as things that have a structure of ‘oneness’, even though ‘one’ is an effect of the presentation

of things, and not of the most fundamental reality.

Given, this, Badiou thinks that being would be -- like the infinite infinities that it also is unthinkable,

ineffable, if not for the fact that if modern mathematics hadn’t happened to provide an extraordinary

way for breaking with the history of ontology and providing a way to present being ‘as that which is not

one’, but which is always presented through an operation that ‘counts-it-as-one”: this is ZFC set theory.

But, why does Badiou see an ontology in ZFC set theory?

 19

First, set theory in general (but especially the axiomatic model of set theory that he favours in particular)

allows us to talk about ‘what is’ at a kind of maximum level of abstraction, thus avoiding what I said is,

for Badiou, as an excessive privilege to human ways of speaking or seeing.

Set theory deals with collections or structures of things without having to make any distinctions about

what is being talked about: (we can have a set of unicorns or quarks, or to quote Foucault quoting

borges, a set of “animals that have just broken the water pitcher” and so on into more and more absurd

and ‘gruesome’ (as analytic philosophers say) examples.

But at the same, Badiou thinks that ZFC avoids both anything but the most minimal definition of the set

(relying instead on its series of interconnected axioms) and indeed, only one minimal relation:

belonging. (There is also for Badiou the very important relation of ‘inclusion’): thus, the most

fundamental level of reality (the presentation of being) can be itself presented (mathematically).

The result of this is that no mathematical object is assumed as ‘existing’, prior to the application of set-

theory axioms: we do not have to assume, in other words, that there exists anything like operations’, or

‘functions’ or ‘numbers’, because all of these things can be defined in simply circular terms via the

axioms of the theory.

Now, in treating ZFC set theory as an ontology, Badiou translates the notion of a ‘set’ into his

ontological notion of a ‘situation’. Badiou uses the term ‘situation’ to refer to any collection of

variously “consistent”, “ordered” or “presented” multiples. Badiou’s use of the word presentation in

this context is confusing, but, to simplify, he means essentially: treated as ‘one’ for the purpose of being

a member in a particular e set.

 20

Thus, in a set of, say animals, ‘dogs’ belong to this set, even though the dog’s oneness is ambiguous: i.e.

we could break a dog down into a multitude of cells, molecules quarks, contending quantum forces, or

whatever.

The dog is thus present in the “situation” of animals, and in the situation of ‘living beings’, but this

‘belonging’ to the situation tells us very little about dogs or animals in itself.

To help see the implications of this: I give an example of Badiou’s own. Badiou says imagine a plate of

food on the table: this is a ‘set’, i.e. a a situation insofar as the plate consists of (contains) a variety of

elements in the form of those things that by being ‘on the plate’ may be described as ‘belonging’ to the

‘situation’ (set) of ‘stuff on this plate’. S(p).

Now, the plate of food, as a whole might belong to the situation of ‘things that human beings consider

edible’, despite the fact that each of the edible items on this plate are also composed of molecules,

quarks, et cetera, that we wouldn’t normally include in the set of edible things, even though they are

indispensable conditions for the existence ( parts ) of the edible things on the table.

Badiou’s major interest – once he’s started to build his set theory ontology (and I’m skimming awkward

and time-consuming mathematics) is that there can be, as we can see form the preceding example,

parts of a situation which belong to it without being included in it.

(This nature of parts that belong without being included, is expressed for Badiou in the Zermelo Frankel

power set axiom, which reveals the Cantorian discovery of the excess of parts over elements. What this

means is that, even and especially for sets whose members stretch on to infinity: that a whole can be

smaller than its parts even if that whole is infinite.)

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In taking ZFC set theory as itself representing the present “ontological” situation, Badiou thinks that the

potentially innumerable excess of parts over elements in the theory (as in reality)derives fromw hat

Badiou describes as the ‘gap between being and presentation’, or in other words it a consequence of the

paradox that everything that ‘is’ must in some sense be ‘one’, even though for Baidou, being, as a pure

multiple is not one (which is why it can never be encountered as itself). Instead, the closest we get to

being is the laws of its presentation in ZFC (i.e. ontology). In this sense, and only this sense, Badiou

subscribes to the Heideggerian maxim that Being ‘withdraws’ even as it is ‘given’ (i.e. to be present, it

must be presented ‘as one’, whereas the essence of being is ‘pure mulitplicity’.

Now, Badiou thinks that a major consequence of using ZFC set theory as an ontology, is that the very

existence of structure or presentation (which means that there are beings) of being as pure-multiple

requires is a result of what he calls the ‘void’, that which is represented in ZFC set theory by the ‘null

set’.

The null set for Badiou, in a way, is the symbol of being. It represents being because it never presents

itself (has no structure), belongs to everything (every situation or set) while nothing can belong to it, and

yet as such is the condition of possibility for any structure: how do you get (as hegel asks) something that

isn’t one, to be in some sense counted as one?

Badiou’s answer is, in a way, the same as Hegel’s: through the effect of nothingness.

As nothingness, Badiou thinks that (non)being is the condition for presentation or structure. The

thought here is that if being were a consistent as opposed to an inconsistent multiplicity it should present

itself AS manyness-without-one which is impossible) but also, therefore a precariousness to the structure

of every situation: every belonging together of elements.

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Because every situation is precarious, Badiou thinks that a situation has both a ‘structure’ (a way of

being presented) and a meta-structure: a way of containing the excess of parts over elements.

To think of this: we’ll go back to the plate of food.

Everything on the plate belongs to the plate, even if we now add, as Badiou does, that our plate’s just

fallen into the dirt such that the fruit and the …ice cream has been mixed with dirt, as well as bone-dust

from the skeleton of a bird, worms, a bit of glass and so on. Now, insofar as the plate has fallen into the

dirt, all of these things and the parts of which they consist (themselves sets of other things, situations

unto themselves) belong to the situation of the plate.

In Badious’ terms, “meta-structure” of the situation of the plate, or its form of representation would be

via what he in his late work calls a ‘transcednental index’ or – something that gives a principle to the

way elements are grouped together or counted. Thus, the plate could be thought of (represented) as

consisting in edible stuff and horrible inedible things. This would be a meta-structure, a way of

representing the set.

If we remember that a situation can be anything (The situation of this room conceived physically, or

emotionally, or politically), the situation of the ecological crisis, of a chess game et cetera, Badiou thinks

every situation has a ‘state’, i.e. a way of ordering the situation beyond the pure ‘belonging of its

elements’. It is this ‘state of the situation’ (the structure of the situation) which makes ‘decisions’ about

what belonging means, and what parts of elements get included in the set by what principles.

But the state of the situation is always precarious. The reason for this is that the ‘state of the situation’

or its ‘principle of counting or ordering’ is threatened by the existence of any multiple, as a part of it,

which belongs to the situation without being represented in it (let’s say, as Badiou does, in this case a

part of the plate that consists in bits of fruit with bits of skeleton and bits of dirt)
 23

It’s perhaps more vivid if we imagine it with philosophers.

There are all types who belong to the field of philosophy . We divide the field: there are analytics, there

are continentals, there are philosophers of mind and so on. But, what if the situation of Australian

philosophy today contained one philosopher -- we’ll call her Petra – who belongs to the situation of

philosophy but the inclusion of whose papers into the state of philosophy today would lead to all of us

having to reconsider what philosophy is.

Because by Badiou’s ontology, the ordering of any state (beyond the basic, not-much-of-an-order

ordering of things ‘belonging to a situation’ is ultimately precarious (because meta-structure is an

attempt to hold of the ‘void’ that attends any situation) it makes sense to talk of an element whose

inclusion into the representation of the set (it’s meta-structure) would blow that structure apart, expose

its underlying lack of reality.

Similarly we might say, that there was a time, when Einstein’s first papers into the situation of physics at

the beginning of the century, or T.S. Eliot’s vers libre, or Schönberg’s atonal music belonged to the

situation of music, or poetry, or physics in the basic sense of belonging, but they weren’t at all

represented yet as included inn the situation proper : because this could not happen without changing

the state of music, physics or poetry, such that it would have a different transcendental index (as Badiou

calls it in his later work) a different principle of ordering the elements of the situation, into things which

have more and less intense forms of appearance.

Similarly, Badiou thinks, if the billion or so slum-dwellers of the world, were to be included in the way

the global political-economic arrangement is ‘structured’, as opposed to merely belonging to (being

present in) the world, our liberal-capitalist political order would have to change fundamentally.
 24

Last, we could think about the way that the history of philosophy always belongs to philosophy. but

always contains parts of what belongs to it (ideas) that are not represented in the state of philosophy

(the current fashions, norms, sense of what philosophy is about and could not be without completely

changing the state of the situation (the way things are ordered or relate to each other).

Badiou calls any situation that contains at least one element that is present in a situation but totally

unrepresented in it an evental site. To get from his notion of an evental site to an event (and thus to

truth) we need one more step.

For Badiou an event is a multiple (in other words an entity, counted as one, but still (infinitely) divisible

into component parts, that appears in an evental site and that starts to link elements of the situation

together in a set which includes itself.

What this means is, that if we take an event like the French revolution, we have all kinds of stuff

belonging to the situation “France 1789 to 1794”. We have the angry sans culottes of Paris, the deputies

signing the cahiers de dolerance, the Austrian Queen, and the angry political pamphleteers writing

pornographic denunciations of her excesses, the life-story Robespierre, starving peasansts, bread,

microbes, languages, and so on: innumerable elements divisible into innumerable parts. The point is

that, for there to be an ‘event’ the French revolution, there has to be something that links all of these

elements that were present in the prior situation (but often ‘uncounted’ in the ‘state of the situation’)

together into a new situation which includes the situation (the revolution) as one of its elements: the

idea here is that -- you can’t just have a bunch of things, you have to have the grouping of bunch of

things together with a self-showing of the new set to which the things are grouped after the

unprecedented inclusions.
 25

Now, in Zeremelo-Fränkel set theory, no set can be a member of itself. In speaking of the event,

Badiou is talking precisely of a set that is a member of itself. As Badiou is well-aware, the axiomatic

forbidding of this self-inclusion (which leads to Russell’s paradox) is one of the reasons that ZFC exists.

But, Badiou, considers the violation of ontology legitimate, because he thinks, an event, is precisely, in

breaking with the axioms of what he has decided is ontology, something of dubious ontological status.

Something that may consist of either “being” or “nothingness” (which we have seen have already been

linked together in other aspects of the metaphysical apparatus of Being and Event.)

We reach finally the most remarkable thing that Badiou links this notion of the event not only to truth

(or truths), in a move that he thinks, gives modern philosophy a post-Cantorian Platonism.

For Badiou, truth is the process of negotiating, drawing out consequences and dealing with the

consequences of an event whose original status is undecidable, and thus requires it to be decided upon

human beings, whose lives are transformed by an encounter with things whose appearance in a

situation, not only changes that situation, but invokes the possibility of a situation whose members

cannot be seen, because it is intrinsically paradoxical, indeterminate, in violation of everything we know

about the world prior to the event.

Thus, for the life and death of Socrates to be an event, it one, needs a) to be something that could not

be included into the moral, political, intellectual situation of Athens would be radically transformed, b)

people like Plato or Xenophon, who having been ‘seized by’ or affected by the event then undertake the

at once rigorous, creative and adventurous (because unprecedented) process of trying to think through

the consequences of the event by seeing how the implications of the event connect or do not connect to

other aspects of the situation.

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In short, for the life and death of Socrates to be an event for us we need a Plato who, having decided

that Socrates’ life was indeed an event, sets what Badiou calls the ‘truth process” into motion. By truth

process Badiou means the potentially inexhaustible series of operations that could be taken up by

anyone regardless of place in prior states of situations, as long as they were willing to follow through

and endeavour to work through and work out the consequences of the event into ever new situations:

connecting evental (unrepresented and possibly paradoxical) realities to things represented by the state

of things.

Thus, Plato is a subject to truth, because he decides that the fact that Socrates lived and died, changes

everything he knows about life, about thought, about society, such that he has to invent, and think, and

overcome obstacles and retrace his steps, and return to the beginning and start again, in an attempt to

square the event ‘Socrates’ with aspects of the knowledge fo the day, the political, erotic and artistic life

of Athens of his time.

But what relates this moment of existential decision to truth?

Well, and this is very important to avoid misunderstandings has to – Badiou does not think of truth, as

equivalent to the arrival of the event, nor does he equate it with the moment at which the “subject”

gets seized by the event.

Instead, he decides (with no real basis for doing so) that this thing (this encounter, this experience, this

occurrence in the situation of my amorous life or in the lives of people) is something and not nothing.

Thus, ‘truth’ is not the epiphany by which Plato is struck by the remarkable life and death of Socrates,

but what emerges in the process of Plato, attempting to tie the consequences to the situation

This would be to nihilistically equate truth with voluntarism.

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Now, it’s true that Badiou reminds his readers constantly that truth is not to the road to Damascus

epiphany, but rather the attempts to trace and follow through the consequences of such an epiphany.

In other words, it is not the moment in which I decide that I feel this surge of romantic feelings or get

the sense that this strange temporary thought that Alban Berg might be a composer whose legacy I have

to try to deal with in my own compositions that is to be equated with ‘truth’ but rather in my

subsequent long struggle to be a composer who takes what Berg has done seriously without merely

imitating him, or treating him as a blueprint for my own work. It is the process by which I will be

required to constantly decide whether either (or both, or neither) my domestic-monogamous long-term

relationship or my series of hedonistic/utilitarian pragamatic flings is adequate to the ‘idea of love’ that

first gripped me when I was struck by love’s – ever traumatic – event.

Thus, the most important point and one I’m not sure is brought out very often is that although Badiou

speaks of truth here, it is not the event, but rather the kind of processes described above (which Badiou

associates with ‘fidelity to the event’) in which truth is to be sought, anticipated, and found in the very

relentlessness of the seeking. Furthermore, fidelity is not to be understood as a slavish deference to,

‘what has happened in the past’: as if a past commitment bound us with chains of iron.

On the contrary taking the consequences of a ‘truth’ process to the point of the repudiation of what has

been institutionalized or accepted as the truth of that event, is more often than not the litmus test of

fidelity. In other words, what links fidelity to truth is not the mere fact of declaring oneself for an event

(“I am in love!”, “Freud changes everything!”, “From now on I will work to help the poor who are, truly,

God’s people”) but the fact that an attempt to be faithful to the event means tracing its consequences

into a potentially never-ending series of situations, and seeing these new situations in the light of the

event.
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It is therefore, this becoming visible of the invisible that results from looking at situations in the light of

‘fidelity to the event’ that Badiou calls truth. This is because, in the process of fidelity (the truth

process) multiples that belonged to the situation, but which remained uncounted, are suddenly

illuminated in terms of a principle of counting that would belong to a situation that does not (yet) exist,

such that the existence of this ‘new’ situation (the future), would constitute a violation of the laws of

reality that govern the situations that we know now.

Now, in conclusion, I want to maintain that Badiou’s notion of truth is a Platonic notion of truth, despite

how counter-intuitive (and even downright mad) this may sound to you.

I grant without hesitation that Plato knew nothing of ZFC set theory or transfinite numbers, or of any of

the building blocks of Baidou’s system. But this is trivial, surely, when we are as I’ve said from the

outset talking of the ‘spirit’ of Plato, and not the letter.

More seriously, it might be objected that the very idea of Cantorian infinity which is more important for

Badiou than I’ve had time to explain, would scandalize Plato as it did any fGreek.

But here we must be careful of not confusing Plato with Aristotle. While Aristotle’s ethics (and politics)

undoubtedly rely to a large extent on his teleological view fo man and the cosmos, I’m not sure that a

similar case can be made from Plato.

After all, the cosmology of the Timaeus (is not only dizzyingly complex) and ambiguous, but also

described as ultimately a ‘probable tale’.

Second, if we believe that the essence of a Platonic notion of truth is thinking that truth is a matter of a

correspondence between perceptions, thoughts, words and hyper-uranian entities called ‘forms’ (or

more evocatively, and more accurately ‘ideas’)we should remember how much this doctrine is
 29

complicated and shown to be paradox generating in the Parmenides and The Sophist, second the

pedagogical context in which they are first raised.

If we think of this, I believe it makes more sense to say that the real heart of Plato’s notion of truth is

the non-distinction of the ideal to the real. Thus, contra to those who argue, either way, Plato is both

an ‘idealist’ and a ‘realist’ insofar as he suggest that the further we get from what we know, i.e. the

closer we get to the realm of ‘forms’, or abstraction the closer we get to the reality of things But this

does not have to be understood as a ‘two-world’ theory, where the real is ‘beyond the (literal) clouds’,

as much as it is beyond the fogs and miasmas of what we think we know.

In the end, I will risk your condemnation and your tomatoes, and say that for Badiou, thought, (in a very

broad sense which of think which includes ‘act upon’, work through) like art, and politics involves

attempting to deal with things that we know cannot be justified on the basis of what we know of reality

and attempting to connect them with what we do know as the ‘state of the situation’ , i.e. of our

various worlds with a rigour that is as if norm-governed, but which because of the present of ‘evental’

elements is irreducible to recognizable normative space: thus, a political activist needs to know about

the way the world works and the WTO, the economy, but her activity, also involves attempting to bring

to bear on this state of the stiutation formulae that will connect strange ‘evental’ notions like ‘justice’,

and axiomatic declarations like ‘all human beings are equal’ with what we know of a reality that –

empirically – contradicts these maxims.

Platonism stands here for the idea of trying to think through and act upon things of dubious ontological

status in the real world, and doing so with the rigour as well as the creativity of mathematics. The state

of the situation of education, philosophy and politics today is such that weird hybrids or monsters as

these go acknowledged. But, it is surely, the task of philosophy today, as it has always been, to
 30

demand, a thought, that would illuminate these monsters which, beyond the cave, are the denizens of

the sunlit world of our (properly philosophical)

desire.