Alain Badiou Quotes on Knowledge
Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (L’Être et l’Événement, 1988) and Logics of Worlds (Logiques des mondes, 2006) give contemporary continental philosophy one of its most ambitious systematic statements of post-Maoist materialist metaphysics. The central thesis is that mathematics — specifically, post-Cantorian set theory — is ontology, articulating the inconsistent multiplicity of pure being independently of any phenomenological or hermeneutic mediation, while genuine knowledge in the substantive sense is produced through fidelity to the singular events that erupt in the four truth-procedures of love, art, science, and politics. The framework, drawing on Cantor, Cohen, and the structuralist French philosophical tradition through Althusser and Lacan, shaped a generation of continental philosophers and the contemporary reception of mathematics as a philosophical resource.
Quotes
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“Mathematics is ontology.”
Introduction -
Attributed to Alain Badiou:
“Truth is what punches a hole in knowledge.”
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“Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”
Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the inaugural axiom of philosophy - Leibniz formulation is excellent; 'What is not a being is not a being' - yet it is also its impasse; an im -
“We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.”
Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology -
“Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”
We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption. -
“Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is'.”
Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology -
“Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”
Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is'. -
“Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”
According to the way it is generally used today, the term 'ethics' relates above all to the domain of human rights, 'the rights of man'- or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing 'rights' that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive, to enjoy 'fundamental' liberties (of opini -
“Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”
In the political domain, deprived of any collective politcal landmark, stripped of any notion of the 'meaning of History’; and no longer able to hope for or expect a social revolution, many intellectuals, along with much of public opinion, have been won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy.