This doesn’t exactly clear things up, but it’s a little clearer in Heidegger (at least as I read him, and probably even as Deleuze or even Derrida reads Heidegger) that there is indeed something that does the ontological differentiating– it is Being that grounds, Being that always gives beings into the word (In-der-Welt-Sein), gives its being there (Da-sein), throws beings into the world– than it is what “counts” the counts-as-one in Badiou, what properly grounds any ontic difference in the ontological for Badiou.

For Heidegger, language is die Ursprung des Seins, the “wellspring of Being.” Being speaks through beings. (He also thought Being favored Greek and German in particular, but we’ll ignore that for our intents and purposes.)

Could it be that Heidegger was (partially) right? That set theory or mathematic functions of any sort can only properly describe or apply to beings that have already appeared, as they appear–and will remain therefore relegated to the ontic, mute regarding Being?

That’s the million dollar question I guess.

As far as “continental philosophy” after Heidegger is concerned, you’re right in identifying a schism forming around this question and taking shape with Badiou on one side on Deleuze on the other. Does seem to be monopolizing the airwaves doesn’t it?

however, I think there is good reason to worry about giving-talk as much as there is counting-talk. both do seem to imply an agent of some kind or other. I’m perfectly fine with things if one wants to say that the being counts itself as one through an operation internal to itself, that being makes itself consistent, or however you want to put this, but it seems to me that Badiou simply cannot say this.

that is, you seem to have missed what to me is the other horn of the dilemma. you elaborate, quite nicely, how Badiou cannot say that the count is only a result of human intervention. however, it seems he also cannot say that being counts itself, insofar as he only arrives at the notion of Being as an inconsistent multiplicity by reading backwards from the fact of the count (he says it is only “retroactively legible” or something like that in one of the first 3 meditations of Being and Event). in other words, it seems to me that he cannot say that Being counts itself as one while maintaining that Being itself is fundamentally not-one – if Being were internally determined to count itself as one, would we not end up with Being as one? whither this excess that escapes any count?

so, it seems, on the one hand, Badiou has to say that the count is something imposed on Being by something other than itself qua inconsistent multiplicity, and on the other, he has to say that this something cannot simply be the human subject, for reasons you are articulated brilliantly above.

so, unless I am missing something, the only option would be for Badiou to say that each existent is counted-as-one by every other existent, while remaining in-itself fundamentally inconsistent. then he could say that we also count ourselves as one, not from the standpoint of Being, but from the standpoint of existence.

it seems to me that there is a very strong distinction in Badiou between Being (qua inconsistent multiplicity) and existence (qua consistent multiplicity), where existence takes up the role of the “ontic” that Levi is so worried about..

That’s a provocative way of looking at it – generalisation of this kind seems to be the popular philosophical move of the moment…

I’m not so sure about the mapping between “Evenement” and “Ereignis” – the latter is perhaps closer to Deleuze’s sense of “event” than Badiou’s (not that I’d know, particularly).

But this reminds me to pick up my logic studies again…

A very non-technical comment, since we your readers are all approaching your para-Dretskean account of observation in fits and starts: it’s interesting that you invoke Heidegger’s use of *es Gibt*, which gives being, but why oh why does nobody ever analyze Badiou’s Event in terms of *Ereignis*? The book after all does translate into German as *Sein und Ereignis*, and although Badiou would have had to be pretty cagey to get ahold of the *Beitraege* by the time he was writing it, one certainly make the case that he is generalizing Heidegger’s two-stroke “inceptive thinking” (pre-Socratic physics/postmodern “cloture” of metaphysics) to cover intellectual irruption throughout history and on various scales.

Now, I myself analyzed *Ereignis* (about as successfully as usual per me) in terms of hybrid modal logic, which has the expressive resources to make statements about “points”/possible worlds expressible through “nominals”, which name a state. Reading Badiou back-to-front, I am tempted to say that the “count-as-one” arises precisely in an evental context, where we possess the resources to “nominalize” the passel of natural beings scientifically-mathematically regimented within the purview of the event — evental truths are not part of “presentation” for the reason that presentation occurs within a “paradigm” which requires greater expressive resources than the “object language” possesses.

It seems to me that this is a fair pass at Badiou’s intent, and although it is thoroughly “correlationist” it does not make for much in the way of absolute knowledge either — and undoing the “ideal” supports for counting as one would thrust one into the degenerate backwater of mathematical fictionalism, a position scarcely recognizable as Badiouian.