Tuesday 2 June 2009

Because, it is as it is...

What an exuberant market day yesterday was.  Irrational?  We shall see.  In the meantime, Missmc has been flicking through Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds, Being and Event II looking for some kind of correlative track of thought.  Hands down, this is the hardest book to read that I've ever ever encountered.  I do think a mathematically inclined brain would fare better.  I've wrestled with the the first thirty pages, glanced at the handy dictionary of symbols, and wandered through "notes, commentary and digressions".  And I can't get in there.  This book is less the famously socialist Badiou and focuses more on the concept of logic.  So far, I am thinking he has a bit of Russell's mathematical acrobatics crossed with Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but I could be far far off the mark. 

In a recent interview with Badiou on Hardtalk (BBC), the focus was on the political in relation to the economic crisis.  His theoretical abstractions were bashed about a bit by the interviewer whose mandate seemed to be to reveal Badiou as a raging communist.  When Badiou was asked about reactions to the economic crisis and whether he thought the French were "angry enough" (daft) he responded thoughtfully, dismissing the idea of anger in itself as enough.

To paraphrase, he said, "You must have some ideas, some great ideas"..."ideas of the possibility of something else"...

Here is the interview. Parts two and three add nothing and are worth skipping so I've not posted them...

But you should not miss the best quote from part 2 --

"As a philosopher, I never accept the world as it is, because, it is as it is..." "chuckle chuckle".


2 comments:

Leigh Caldwell said...

Unfortunately I seem to recall that Badiou doesn't work too well for a mathematician either. I will have a go at revisiting it, but I think he makes the usual mistake of philosophers who try to use the hard sciences:

* makes some quite weak mappings of concepts onto set theory which require strict constraints on the concepts
* derives set theoretical results using valid mathematics
* maps the results back onto the concepts and declares the exciting and powerful conclusions, but conveniently forgetting the constraints that he added in the first place


Even some economists (impossible, I hear you cry) have been known to fall into this trap.

I will dig out some Badiou later this week and report back to say whether my accusations above are actually fair.

missmarketcrash said...

thanks math-boy. i am not a fan from second-hand citings but thought i ought to give him a chance firsthand....

he is running around the corner, shouting "math IS philosophy"...