Updates and a Re-commitment

It is hard for me to believe that the last post in my [Badiou and Science] series was a year and a half ago, and that there have only been two posts in the last two years.

Unfortunately, life gets in the way of grand passion projects such as this. As many of you know, my day/night job is working as a relatively new Emergency Room doctor, and to say that the current climate has been busy for me would be an understatement. (Expect some personal posts about my unique experiences with this, navigating our broken healthcare system and its relentless Capitalist wheel that prizes profits over people.)

Just prior to the pandemic, I was very fortunate to meet and bear witness to Alain Badiou speaking at a wonderful seminar put together by my alma mater, Columbia University. While that encounter reinvigorated my passion for this project, no sooner did I recommence work on it than did this insidious virus upend both my personal and professional life. Once again did I have to put this project on the back-burner.

However, the last few months have shown a (modest) uptick in readership and interest in this series, and in the general conversation around Badiou and his revolutionary thought. The pandemic still rages. But even more importantly, unrest still rages and has become magnified in recent times. Civil unrest, social unrest, racial unrest, economic unrest… all in response to a system that was so obviously going to fail when called upon to assist us in the midst of a social and healthcare crisis where no profit was to be gained to fuel its vile machinations. An unrest that has required the mobilization of a common and undifferentiated people at a time where physical gathering carries very real personal risk.

There is no better time than the present to interrogate the possibilities of Badiou’s conceptual framework for thinking through revolution and the emancipatory potential that it opens up; whether that revolution be political, scientific, artistic, or amourous. This was always the ultimate wager of Badiou’s work — revolutions may occur in a variety of historical fields, but the structure of revolution is always the same and can precisely described by modern mathematics.

I think we are all waiting with bated breath for the English translation of Being and Event III: The Immanence of Truths and the continued conceptual possibilities that it will open up in its exploration of thinking Infinity and Infinities. With a projected arrival date of mid-2021, I am going to try and be optimistic that I can accelerate our project here in order to comment on the bearings of this new (and final) text on the dynamics that we are uncovering between Badiou’s work and the sciences.

This being said, here is my projected roadmap for the immediate future:

• We will conclude Section 1 with an exploration of the Axiom of Foundation and the Axiom of Choice, and the paradoxes they introduce into the heart of set theory, followed by a summary of the major points of Section 1.
• Section 2 is where things get interesting, and we will begin to see Badiou’s critical insights in applying set theory to the “real world” (what I will term Badiou’s “great leap”). Taking off from the set theory paradoxes, we will see how Badiou conceptualizes the types of historical “situations”, their inherently unstable structure, and then their potential for upheaval. We will discuss Paul Cohen’s method of “forcing” and observe how Badiou utilizes the possibility of this technique to describe the general structure of revolution and the Subject of Truths.
• Section 3 will either cover Badiou’s Ethics, or begin to compare Badiou’s work to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions with the Theory of Relativity as a case study. Most likely the latter before the former, if just to show a concrete application of Badiou’s theory.

Join us, won’t you? There is work to be done!

-Dr. G