PART ONE
Being and appearing
Chapter 1
Unframing, enframing, reframing
So far, we have focused almost exclusively on the âradicalâ side of Badiouâs thought, the part comprising the event and everything that follows from its sudden irruption, and which is preoccupied with things like newness and sweeping change. Yet Badiouâs so-called âmatureâ philosophy effectively kicks off long before the event arrives on the scene, with his celebrated (if initially perplexing) pronouncement in the opening pages of Being and Event that âmathematics is ontologyâ.1
It really is difficult to overstate the importance of this inaugural assertion. Everything that follows from it â from the structure of situations and their states all the way to events and the subjects and truths they can engender â must be understood as the carefully drawn out consequences of this initial philosophical decision (we say âdecisionâ because the actual mathematical status of ontology is, as we will see, not something that can be known, but rather something that can only be decided upon). In fact, as we suggested at the very start of this book, such is the rigor with which Badiou constructs Being and Event that those who reject Badiouâs core philosophy arguably do so foremost because they reject his initial thesis on the equivalence of mathematics and ontology. For if this thesis is unfounded, so too is Badiouâs entire philosophy. Conversely, in accepting the equivalence of mathematics and ontology it is hard to avoid its manifold ramifications, meticulously laid out in Being and Event and the works that follow.
The one or the multiple?
Before we consider the meaning (much less the consequences) of Badiouâs equation of ontology with mathematics, we would do well to remind ourselves exactly what ontology is.
Plainly put, ontology designates the science of being qua being. This was Aristotleâs original definition in the Metaphysics, and Badiou employs it as such in his own writings. Yet âbeingâ is itself an elusive concept. The easiest way to come to grips with it is through a simple thought experiment. First, imagine an object, any object; a tree, another person, a wooden stool, a paper bag⌠Now imagine that we can strip away all of this objectâs properties, everything that identifies the object as this object (and not another). All we can now say of the object is that it simply is. This indistinct remainder is none other than the objectâs pure being. âBeing qua beingâ (meaning being itself or being as such) is then basically another way of saying pure being, or being that purely and simply is, divorced from all of its particular qualities and attributes. Moreover, given that everything that exists is, ontology would seem to equally designate the study of what is common to everything. In this precise sense â and this will become important later in the book â ontology is equally the discourse of universality.
It is also essential to recognize that when Badiou says that ontology literally is mathematics, this is in no way to suggest that being is itself mathematical or is composed of mathematical objects. To the contrary, what he means is that mathematics figures the scientific discourse on, or way of talking about, being. (Accordingly, to suggest that being is itself mathematical would be to illegitimately conflate ontology, which is simply the discourse on being, with the object of this discourse, namely, being itself.) Or more precisely, mathematics says everything that can be said about being; it is the only discourse up to the task of articulating being qua being. It is however, for reasons we will explore presently, only today â which is to say, after Georg Cantorâs invention of the mathematical field of set theory in the late nineteenth century (and its subsequent axiomatization by Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel in the early twentieth century) â that we can truly know this.
Mathematics to one side, in Being and Event Badiou holds that being itself, being qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity. By which he means that once an object is divested of (or subtracted from) everything that goes into making it a âuniqueâ thing â once we isolate it from its context and strip away all of its qualitative determinations â what remains is essentially a multiple of multiples. There is no intrinsic determination to this multiple multiplicity; it is not a multiple of âthisâ or of âthatâ, rather, it is purely â or it purely is â multiple. This pure multiple remainder, Badiou claims, is precisely the being of the object, the elementary âthere isâ underlying everything that âis thereâ. Crucially, there is no âatomicâ halting point to this infinite decomposition; what we arrive at is not the âOneâ (that is, some form of primordial unity, an indivisible base from which everything sallies forth), but rather the void, nothingness itself â the in-finite dissemination of multiple multiplicity.
Now, if the idea that in journeying to the heart of âwhat isâ we do not eventually stumble across some elementary unit â a kind of irreducible âatom of beingâ â but rather only infinite multiple multiplicity seems somewhat counterintuitive, well, thatâs because it is. Indeed, Badiou begins Being and Event by literally turning the history of ontology â which, from Parmenides on, holds that what is is one and what is there (or is presented) is multiple â on its head.
Taking as his point of departure Platoâs famous theses on the one and the multiple in the Parmenides, Badiou begins by isolating a crucial variation in Platoâs terminology â specifically, between two âkindsâ of multiplicity, ĎÎťÎˇÎ¸ÎżĎ (plethos) and ĎοΝΝι (polla) â to argue that Platoâs true position is not, as it is generally understood, that âif the one is not, nothing isâ, but rather that âif the one is not, (the) nothing isâ.2 The logic here is subtle but no less devastating. At base it means that, if there is no ultimate consistency or unity to being (âif the one is notâŚâ), then being must in fact in-consist (ââŚthe nothing isâ). This simple but counter-intuitive reversal is really the key to Badiouâs âsubtractiveâ ontology: that which is one (or is âconsistentâ) is not, strictly speaking, what is. Rather, what is per se is multiple (devoid of any instance of the one, radically withdrawn from all possible unification). Which is finally to say that being, when thought in its very being (that is, as being qua being), is nothing other than inconsistent multiplicity, and that ontology, which is the discourse on being, must accordingly be the science of the pure multiple.
So Badiou launches his philosophical project by arguing against the one in favour of the multiple which is radically âwithout-oneâ (recruiting Plato to his cause along the way). Yet he cannot escape the fact that âonenessâ exists, that even things that are multiple are nevertheless presented to us as unified. For unity is something that is repeatedly testified to by our everyday experiences; simply, each and every object we experience is, in an immediate sense, discrete and coherent, that is to say, unified (when was the last time you experienced the âmultiple-without-oneâ?!). Intuitively, this means that even though, technically speaking, the one is not, there is nevertheless an âeffectâ of oneness, a âone-effectâ whereby inconsistency is somehow rendered consistent. This unification or âone-ificationâ of pure multiplicity is precisely the presentation of multiplicity as such. Or again, while pure multiplicity is itself inconsistent, it is nonetheless presented as unified. Badiou calls such unified presentation a situation. One of the most plastic and immediately useful terms in Badiouâs philosophical lexicon, a situation is thus any presented multiplicity whatsoever: the desk at which I am currently sitting, the city of Bremen, several sunflowers in a vase, a gathering of sea urchins off the Florida coast, the ruins of ancient Greece, an art exhibition, Brazil, a political demonstration, Picassoâs Guernica, the discourse of ontology itselfâŚ
Now the operation by which pure multiplicity actually becomes âone-ifiedâ (i.e. is presented or âsituatedâ) is itself termed the âcount-as-oneâ or simply the count, for the rather straightforward reason that it âcountsâ certain elements (multiples) as belonging to the situation (while at the same time âdiscountingâ others). The count is thus the operation that structures the situation â indeed, it literally is the structure of the situation â and is to this effect indistinguishable from the situation itself. The crucial ontological distinction is then found at the level of the situationâs being: the pure being of the situation â the âbefore of the countâ (or what precedes structuration) â necessarily remains beyond the situation itself, inasmuch as its being is uncounted (or âinconsistentâ) multiplicity.
The paradox here is fundamental: as all knowledge is necessarily âsituatedâ, the in-consistent being which underlies all consistency is itself radically unknowable. Thus any consideration of what precedes the situation is itself hopelessly compromised by virtue of its very situatedness. Inconsistency is therefore what Lacan would call the ârealâ of presentation, namely, the point at which knowledge butts against its own limit. Which is why Badiouâs initial embrace of the multiple (and concurrent assertion that âthe one is notâ) is moreover a pure decision, insofar as the actual status of pure multiplicity is itself properly undecidable. Furthermore, this is one of the main reasons why Badiouâs ontology should be understood as being essentially subtractive: in the face of a classical metaphysics defined by âthe enframing of being by the oneâ,3 Badiou decides that ontology can be nothing other than the theory of in-different, in-consistent multiplicity, radically subtracted from the power of the one. (We will return to this âsubtractiveâ point momentarily.)
And so, with a simple yet powerful philosophical gesture, Badiou unframes being and returns it to its originary abstraction.
The void and the state
While these difficult and demanding meditations on the one and the multiple may leave you fighting a strong urge to pour yourself a stiff drink, we need to exercise just a little more fortitude as there are two very important consequences of this ontological abstraction that must be highlighted before we can move on. The first is the problem of the void, while the second is its ostensible âsolutionâ in the form of the state.
As we have seen, it follows from the fact that the situation and the count are one and the same thing that the inconsistent substructure of a situation is itself fundamentally ungraspable. However, the simple fact that the count is itself an operation tells us that there must be something on which this operation operates (as we can hardly have an operation without there being something operated-upon!). Thus the count, by its very nature, retroactively posits a corollary âto-be-countedâ, a âbefore-of-thecountâ that can be said to âin-consistâ in the situation.
Now, given the seemingly self-contradictory fact that, whilst everything is counted, the count itself necessarily posits a kind of âphantom remainderâ (namely, the initial multiple qua inconsistent being of the situation), we can only conclude that while the pure multiple is excluded from the situation â from presentation itself â it must at the same time be included in the presentation âin-itselfâ. Excluded from presentation itself, included in presentation in-itself, the pure multiple must really be nothing in the situation. Yet as Badiou points out, being-nothing is not at all the same thing as non-being. In fact, this ânothingâ subsists within the situation in two immediate guises: in the very operation of the count (which, in its âpure transparencyâ, remains itself uncounted); and in the pure multiple upon which the count operates (which, as we have seen, differs in itself from its situated, or consistent, result). The pure multiple thus âin-consistsâ within the situation in the form of the void â as the void in situ â and as such figures the precise point at which the situation is âsuturedâ to its inconsistent being.
Two immediate and important theses follow from this proposition: first, that, according to the situation, the void is the proper name of being; and second, that everything that is is woven from the void.
Yet even while existence owes all that it is to the void, the latter nonetheless presents a real danger to the situation, inasmuch as its very in-consistency inevitably threatens the fabric of structured presentation. For were the situation to actually encounter its void â were it to paradoxically present its inherent inconsistency â this would necessarily undermine its own consistency and thereby spell the âruin of the oneâ. Accordingly, so as to avoid such a catastrophe, every situation as a matter of course subjects itself to a structural re-count, a âcount of the countâ whereby the initial count is itself counted (for, as we saw above, what escapes the operation of the count is precisely the count itself).This essential reframing of the situation establishes a kind of metastructure ensuring that everything in the situation is present and accounted for.
It is this double structuration by which the structure of a situation is itself âcounted as oneâ â thereby ensuring that there is both presentation and representation (or, if you prefer, âenframingâ and âreframingâ) â that Badiou calls, for its âmetaphorical affinity with politicsâ,4 the state of the situation (or simply the âstateâ). Furthermore, it is in this precise sense that Badiou can say that in our world âwhat counts â in the sense of what is valued â is that which is countedâ.5
These three successional acts of framing â the unframing of the one (inconsistent or pure multiplicity), the enframing of being (situation), and the reframing of the situation (state) â are the grounds on which Badiou constructs his entire philosophical edifice.
The art of subtraction
While it is not especially hard to see the enormously productive role of Badiouâs ontology â its vast edifice being entirely built, as we have seen, out of operations that are essentially performed on nothing (i.e. the void) â we need to keep in mind how its basic gesture is in fact subtractive. Indeed, as indicated above, Badiouâs ontology is first and foremost a âsubtractive ontologyâ. We can understand this in a number of ways.
First, it is subtractive in that it in no way purports to convey being as presence. Being (qua being) is most assuredly not what is presented to us.To the contrary, being â pure being â is that which defies any and every form of presentation (or representation, for that matter). Radically...