David Nirenberg

Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology

1. Being and Event When an English translation of Being and Event appeared in 2005, Alain Badiou took the opportunity to reminisce about the initial French publication some twenty years before: “at that moment I was quite aware of having written a ‘great’ book of philosophy.” He located that greatness in four “affirmations” and one “radical thesis.” Affirmation one: “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity.” Two: “The structure of situations does not, in itself, deliver any truths. By consequence, nothing normative can be drawn from the simple realist examination of the becoming of things. . . . A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order.” This type of truth-constituting rupture Badiou calls “the event.” Three: “A subject is nothing more than an active fidelity to the event of truth.” Four: “The being of a truth, proving itself an exception to any pre-constituted predicate of the situation in which that truth is deployed, is to be called ‘generic.’” A truth is a “generic procedure. And to be a Subject (and not a simple individual animal) is to be a local active dimension of such a procedure.” Finally, the “radical thesis”: “Insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.”2 The thesis is indeed radical. Using language borrowed from set theory (Georg Cantor’s multiplicity, Paul Cohen’s generic) Badiou is, throughout, asserting that sets and their properties are there, regardless of whether

The Politics of Love and Its Enemies

573 This article was inspired by Galit Hasan-Rokem’s love of neighbor, disciplined by Harvey Yunis’s love of wisdom, and written within a community of critical friends: Harry Platanakis (whom I have never met, but who guidedme most generously through commensurability in Aristotle), Ricardo Nirenberg, Daniel Heller-Roazen, David Bell, KenMoss, Sean Greenberg, Peter Jelavitch, and at the very end, Hent de Vries and Gabriel Richardson-Lear. 1. RowanWilliams, introduction toTheology and the Political: The NewDebate, ed. CrestonDavis, JohnMilbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham,N.C., 2005), p. 3. The last pages of this essay will touch upon some of the Hegelian roots of the archbishop’s view. Žižek is becoming a leading impresario of a contemporary political theology of love; see, for example, his exposition of “true” and “authentic” Christian love in Žižek,The Fragile Absolute—or,Why Is the Christian LegacyWorth Fighting For? The Politics of Love and Its Enemies

Knowledge from Pebbles: What Can Be Counted, and What Cannot

T here is an idea , powerful across the long history of formation of much of what we take to be knowledge, that the objects of our thought can best be understood as pebbles. By way of explaining this cryptic point, let us remind you of one of Borges’s last stories, “Tigres azules” (Blue tigers). Its narrator, Alexander Craigie, was a Scottish philosopher whomade a living teaching “occidental logic” at Lahore (modern Pakistan) circa 1900. Professor Craigie was in every way an apostle of reason, except that since his earliest childhood he had been fascinated by tigers, which even populated his dreams (already we should feel a slight tension between ways of knowing). Toward the end of 1904 Craigie read somewhere the surprising news that a blue variant of the species had been sighted. He dismissed the report as product of error or linguistic confusion, but eventually even the tigers in his dreams turned blue. Unable to resist his curiosity, he set off toward the sources of the rumor. When he arrived at a Hindu village mentioned in some of the reports and told thevillagerswhathewas looking for, he found that they becamequite guarded, but they claimed to knowof this blue tiger, and