I rather imagine Alex Williams picking up his copy of Logics of Worlds for the third or fourth time, turning at random to a page somewhere in the middle of the exposition of the “materialist postulate” with respect to objects and their real atoms, and sighing forlornly to himself. Is it worth another slog up the Hill Difficulty? Even clevver branes need a rest sometimes. The libidinal exhaustion of his “I Hate Badiou” post is recognizably that of a serious theory-head recovering from the Stockholm Syndrome induced by a previous pass through the migraine barrier. It doesn’t sound, to be honest, like he really hates Badiou; he just…doesn’t love him any more.

I can sympathise – of course! – with the dejection expressed in Alex’s portrait of Badiou’s system as “a ridiculous hyper-structure of nonsense piled upon nonsense, an unsteady philosophical folly…a ziggurat of ruins” (very like a Xasthur song title, that last phrase). Really, who wants to climb that thing? Why not just stand back and let it topple into ruins, exposing the “minimalist elegance” of the “ontological position” on which it was erected? Why not, in fact, make a virtue of this standing-back and letting-topple? Perhaps even, in the spirit of Ballard’s late story about the fall of the leaning tower of Pisa, give it a little push…?

I don’t myself find Logics of Worlds nonsensical, although it is at times mischievously baroque. As with Being and Event, the core question is whether the mathematical framework, which is exact but necessarily non-referential, can obtain any purchase on the inexact but referentially rich domain of human sense. This is not unlike the problem I face on a daily basis in my work as a software engineer, trying to mediate between specifications made up of such nebulous entities as “business requirements” and implementations which take the form of computer programs. There’s no programming language sufficiently close to the way human beings make sense of the world for non-programmers to be able to use it comfortably, and there’s no human-friendly specification language exact and unambiguous enough to be machine-translated directly into code. There’s also good reason to think that the gap between the two domains is uncloseable: what programmers do, like Badiou galloping back and forth between “the poem” and “the matheme”, is try to effect a cogent, if at times “unsteady”, translation between them.

With Being and Event, the wager is that “the thought of the Cantorian multiple” can be apprehended philosophically as ontology. Hanging off that wager is a second, even more tenuous, supposition: that what orthodox (Zermelo-Fraenkel) set theory rules out can be used as the basis for a theory of the event as ontological exception. I’ve always been a bit dubious about the both the philosophical specification (that an event must be ontologically anomalous) and the mathematical implementation (the mathème of the anomaly is that of a non-well-founded multiple, or a set that has itself as one of its elements), but nevertheless it’s reasonably evident that there’s a “fit” of some kind between the two. Logics of Worlds raises the stakes by calling on a somewhat higher-order mathematical language, and taking as its domain of specification the multifarious “worlds” of phenomenal appearance, but Badiou is engaged in essentially the same kind of operation as before.

In Nihil Unbound Ray Brassier makes the objection that the binding between the domains of mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event is radically insecure: in particular, there’s no mathematical rule or ontological norm that establishes how “ontological [mathematical] situations” relate to “non-ontological situations”. His conclusion, like Alex’s, is that Badiou’s ontology should be prized for its minimalist elegance, but finally regarded as the inscription on the tombstone of ontology itself: its virtue lies in its demonstration that ontology, to be “mathematically” consistent, must so thoroughly evacuate itself of referential pertinence that it is no longer the ontology “of” anything. Once this demonstration has been effected, there’s ultimately no need to carry on system-building, adding rococo flourishes to the empty scaffolding. From this perspective, an enterprise like Logics of Worlds appears both quixotic and otiose.

My response here is to suggest that asking for a radically secure binding between philosophy and one of the domains it takes as a “condition” is asking for a relationship of translation to be turned into one of domination: either philosophy must become maths (or politics, etc.), or vice versa. It is of course a compulsion of philosophy itself to attempt this kind of self-founding domination of its conditions, and although Badiou explicitly repudiates this compulsion, he does not always successfully resist it. But the “shakiness” of the structure, its failure to accomplish a complete and self-validating consistency, is not immediately its ruin. Alex is too hasty, in my view, in announcing the degringolade of Badiou’s philosophical system, which like any work of translation is a production of time in love with eternity. Like any major philosophical work, Logics of Worlds establishes its own duration. It will rot in its own sweet time.

UPDATE: Of course Alex said a whole lot of other things, which I had a vague notion I might get around to addressing in a later post…but as Reid Kotlas has done such a stunning job, I suggest you just go and read him…

POSTSCRIPT: Readers under the age of 30 may need the pun in the title of this post explaining to them. I hadn’t realized that the actress who played Marmalade Atkins (the late Charlotte Coleman) later played Jess in the television adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. And then the slightly “punky” one in Four Weddings And A Funeral. That means I’ve fancied her* in three entirely distinct contexts, without realizing it was the same person…

* Obviously I don’t perve over Marmalade Atkins any more. Who do you think I am, Lawrence Miles?

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