Alain Badiou

In a recent , Žižek mentions that he is no longer good friends with Badiou due to political disagreements. Does anybody know what this is about?

I remember there being one but now I cannot find it. If there is please share. Otherwise are there any other social groups where he's discussed?

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible as sensible. This means : the transformation of the sensible into a happening of the Idea.

4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalizing this plurality.

5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.

6. The subject of an artistic truth is the set of the works which compose it.

7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which, in our own contemporary artistic context, is a generic totality.

8. The real of art is ideal impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalization of the advent of a hitherto formless form.

9. The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.

10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense : it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalizes this gesture of abstraction.

11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic : Alone, it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.

12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.

13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.

14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

[...] penso que é um verdadeiro historiador progressista, capaz de descrever e julgar as situações de uma forma ao mesmo tempo documentada, materialista e ousando ir contra a corrente.

O comunismo tem sido, desde a contra-revolução das décadas de 1980 e 1990, objeto de uma ofensiva ideológica massiva, apoiada em flagrantes mentiras históricas, e de uma identificação com o fascismo que, embora seja totalmente absurda, se tornou um lugar-comum.

Losurdo merece imenso crédito por nos dar novas maneiras de lidar com a equação “Stalin = Hitler” pelo que ela é: uma peça enganosa e importante da máquina da ideologia dominante contemporânea.

Entrevista:

I've been aware of Badiou for a while (thanks Zizek) and I've read a few of his shorter texts (Ethics, Manifesto, The Century, In Praise of Mathematics...) as well as a fair amount of secondary literature, so I thought I would try to tackle Being and Event. Initially I was daunted by the prospect of how big a project it is and how I was going to understand the use of set theory, and I was sceptical about the hype ("A figure like Plato or Hegel walks among us"). But my friend who's doing a PhD on Zizek (and is v well read on Badiou) told me that B&E is THE philosophical work of our time if only for how it pulls the rug out from under the whole history of western ontology all the way back to Parmenides (the one is not, ontology is mathematics etc), and encouraged me to read it assuring me that the book even includes a dictionary of the important technical terms - nothing to worry about! So now I'm about half way through the book, and I have to say that it is shaping up to be the most impressive work of philosophy (I guess metaphysics?) I have so far encountered. Not only is the content of the book profound, it also doubles as a pedagogical tour de force giving you a crash course in set theory which in turn elucidates the subject matter; every argument has a mathematical clarity to it, and some of the writing is just beautiful (the 'Meditation' on Pascal kinda moved me even), it really does circulate between the matheme and the poem... So basically I'm really impressed when I wasn't expecting to be, and I'm wondering if anyone else has read or is reading B&E and is impressed as well! So what do you think of Badiou and his architectonic? Can we live the true life? (Happy to learn about criticisms and problems with the project too - especially if you can elucidate Laruelle's criticism of Badiou and philosophy as a whole!)

If any of you are particularly knowledgeable, I have some more specific questions:

• I think I may not have been paying close enough attention when he first introduces the Two, and now I'm at a stage where he's talking about it as if it's a given and I can't find the first instance to clarify what he's talking about: I'm not sure what guarantees its existence, it has just seemed to come out of nowhere... Is it because of the void set and the axiom of the power-set? So like, there's the void-set, and then the power-set states that there will be another set composed of all the parts/sub-sets, and so voila there you have the Two? {Ø,{Ø}} ?

• What would be some concrete examples of situations, evental sites, and events? Like the French revolution and the situation of France (politics)... And under the other conditions (love, art, science)?

• Do you think the disagreement between Badiou and Deleuze really goes that far past polemic? It's funny, I used to think they were diametrically opposed, but the more I read the more connections/resonances I see/hear, or at least they seem less incompatible than they once did. ('Post-Continental Philosophy' by John Mullarkey and 'Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou' by Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe were really good on this I feel.)

• Can there be bad events? I think this was covered in the Ethics, under the names of 'simulacrum', 'betrayal' and 'forcing the unnameable' - but I don't really remember the specifics.